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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http : //books . google . com/| I fJ^Yf^-^.-.^s- HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY JOHN CHIPMAN GRAY CLASS OF ISS9 ^ c^e', /^^ /75., LL.D. 234 pages, index, I2mo, $1.15 net, postage 12 cents. The Hindrances to Good Citizenship By the Right Hon. James Bbycb (Third printing.) 138 pages, index, 12mo, $1.15 net postage 10 cents. Conditions op Progress in Democratic Government By Hon. Chasles Evans Hughes 123 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. American Citizenship By the late David J. Bbbwbb, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court 131 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. The Citizen in his Relation to the Indus- trial Situation By the late Right Rev. Henry C. Potter, D.D., LL.D. 248 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 20 cents. Freedom and Responsibiuty By Arthur Twining Hadley, LL.D., President of YaJe University 175 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. The Citizen's Part in Government By Elihxt Root, formerly Secretary of State 123 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. Four Aspects op Civic Duty By Hon. William H. Taft 111 pages, 12mo, $1.15 net, postage 10 cents. THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP BY SIMEON E. BALDWIN NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON : HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMXII -p^A^ (fo^s-.is- ^ COPYMGHT, 1912 BY Yale XJnivbrsity Pbess First pKntod 50]Xem&6r, 19it, 1000 eopU» HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY FROM THE LIBRARY OF JOHN CHIPMAN GRAY GIFT OF ROUND GRAY SEP 4 1934 PRINTBD IN THE UNITED STATES 9 TO IfT SI8TBB ELIZABETH WOOSTER WHITNEY WH08B LOVB HAS CHBBBSD MT LIFB AND WHOSB BON EDWARD BALDWIN WHITNEY MADB HIS BDUCATION TBLL IN PUBUC SERYICB I DBDICATB THIB BOOK CONTENTS PAGB I. Tbb Powbb which Education Gitbb won Public Sbeyicb 1 II. Shaping Education to Citizsnbhip .... 27 III. The Educated Man as a Votbb, and Pri- vate Citizen 65 IV. The Educated Man in Public Ofticb . . 83 V. The Educated Man as a Gbbatob of Public Opinion . 112 VI. The Spirit of Christian Citizenship . . . 146 Index 173 THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP THE POWER WHICH EDUCATION GIVES FOR PUBLIC SERVICE An ancient university becomes an assemblage of many foundations. They are the gifts and be- quests of as many different men, each seeking^ to perpetuate the pursuit of some particular line of thought or knowledge, which seems to him of especial importance. The founder of this annual lecture was one whose life was a long exposition of what a good citizen can do, though it may be mainly, or wholly, in private station, to make things better in a public way. His object in making this gift to Yale was, to use his own words, to promote among ''students and graduates, and among educated men of the United States, an understanding of the duties of Christian citizenship, and a sense of personal responsibility for the performance of those duties." I shall, then, address myself particularly to those who are receiving, or have received, such a training as makes educated men. 2 THE RELATIONS OF They constitute, throughout the world, a fast- growuxg class, to whom there has been offered great opportunities; on whom there has been thrown corresponding obligations. Not since the early middle ages have imiversities been so thronged. During the first decade of this century, the attend- ance at those in Germany increased from 34,000 to 55,000; ^ and that at those of our own country in a proportion probably not less. This is due partly to the presence of more women,^ but mainly to the oonmion conviction of civilized mankind that a superior education is the best means of adjusting the individual suited to receive it to his environ- ment and making him most useful in his place as a member of human society. ] It involves instruction in the literature of knowl- edge, and the literature of power; in what belongs to the intellect, and in what belongs to the heart; in the spiritual possessions, as well as the material possessions of our race. So far as it is gained in ^ In the Winter semester of 1911-12, 57,398 students were matriculated in the twenty-one German universities, besides 5,5d3 "auditors," who attended lectures, but were not matricu- lated. ' Among the students described in the foregoing note there were 2,796 women in the lists of those matriculated, and 1,739 more of them in the lists of auditors. Science, zxxv, N. S. 6i8. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 3 coDege or university, it is for each accompanied by a judgment of his character, rendered by instructors and fellow-students, frankly pronounced, unspar- ing in its tone whether of commendation or condem- nation, and for the most part self-convincing to himself. Education, if it be real, is one of the great gifts of life. Every man, Goethe said, is either an anvil or a hammer. The educated man has passed through the stage of the anvil and, if he is worth anything in character, is a hammer. Those of them who are worth the most to the conmnmity have been ham- mers from boyhood and, one might say, from birth. The college student and the college graduate may and may not be educated men. College may add little or nothing to what they knew before. They may have allowed themselves to forget that, and to make no new acquirements that are real and substantial. Dean Swift said of Oxford, in his bitter way, that it was a seat of great learning. Everybody who entered it brought some learning with him, for unless he did, he could not gain ad- mission. No one, when he left the University, ever took any learning away. Therefore it steadily accumulated there. I do not think that the limits 4 THE RELATIONS OF of irony would pennit such a taunt to be fairly flung at Yale, or indeed at any university of our day, in England or America. Without denying that success in athletics is ranked too high in the student-worid, as compared with success in scholarship, we must remember that distinction is dear to all, and that Nature produces more young men with capabilities for eminence in the contests of the ball field and the rowing course, than of those who can win the highest scholastic honors. We must remember, too, that the athlete is the product of careful and special education in certain lines, — the education of the body and of the habit of mind. He has learned to be attentive, observant, accurate, obedient. He knows his place. Athletic "training'' is another name for self renunciation and self restraint. If it leads to the coveted success, the man, we may be sure, has done good work in his own peculiar sphere; and whoever in the world does that deserves ap- plause. He has shown both strength of body and strength of character; and he is admired for both. Still, athletics is but one of the side-shows in College life, and the men know it. It was reassuring to hear, last year, of a result of an inquiry set on foot by one of the staff of the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 5 Yale News, llie members of the two lower classes in Yale College were asked which would be their preference: to win a Y in athletics, or the rank in scholarship that assured membership in the 4> B K Society. A large majority preferred eminence in scholarship to eminence in athletics. They were ready to take education in arts and letters at its real value, lliey felt that to gain that was what had brought them here. But College, at best, can give us but a small part of an education. It is only the preface of the book, which she translates for us. Her aim is to let us know why it was written, and for what. What it is comes later. In Emerson's words: ''The things taught in colleges and schools are not an educa- tion, but the means of education.'' The world is our best, as it is our earliest, teacher, — a hard mistress, but generally a just one. She gives and takes. We can be taught to understand what she shows us, better than the wholly uneducated man can. We can be taught to cultivate our powers of ob- servation and discrimination, so that we can per- ceive what she shows us, more clearly than he. We can be taught to reason; to compare; to study the relations of things; to look for the rule that measures 6 THE RELATIONS OF great thing^, as well as small; to use the glass that makes small things seem great, and explain the great. Juvenal said that a single house would show what- ever is done or suffered in the world. Education may give us the power to see, — to see really, — that which it contains. It may give us the X ray power to see into others' hearts. It is true that the experiences of our own life, as it goes on from year to year, are to teach us the deepest lessons. The student of psychology particularly finds his best master here. But he learns also to respect the self-knowledge of those who have had experiences which are not likely to come to him. Except so far, for instance, as the penologist can penetrate the mind of the criminal classes, he will know less of the motives or the con- sequences of crime than the convict in his cell. Sin reveals the sinner to himself. Education will help to give us another quality which, in considering any duties attaching to citizen- ship, is of the first importance. I mean a steady balance of judgment. llie man whom, in the long run, the people are most ready to trust with the care of great things is not the enthusiast, because of his enthusiasm; EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 7 not the orator, because of his eloquence; but the well-poised, cool, and careful statesman. There is a word in our language which has ac- quired a new meaning of late years. It is "sanity.'' We use it to express a faculty of coming to calm and sober decisions, — of taking calm and sober views, belonging in a marked d^ree to an excep- tional man. He. is "sane." llie rest of us are not. This way of looking at men's minds indicates the feverishness of our age. It is unsettled. We may reasonably look to men of higher education to cool it off; to quiet and steady it; to give its forces a direction in healthy ways. Education tends to tolerance. It opens our eyes to the element of soimdness and vitality which is to be foimd in most things that, as a whole, aie false and bad. It teaches us to meet what seems to us sopUstry, at its first approach at least, with a certain respect. Our powers have been trained to enable us to disprove, not to deny. Denials, with no attempt at disproof, simply irritate. Les- sing once said that the only people who bear con- tradiction patiently are the dead; and Voltaire, approaching the same thought from the other side, declared that it was the triumph of reason to be able to live comfortably with those who haven't 8 THE RELATIONS OF got it. Possibly we may find in the end, that it was we, who were without it. And the end is the point of view which an educated man never forgets. He knows that time is the great teacher. Education is always a slow process. The facts which it builds on and the relations between them were each, at some time, newly discovered, and at first but half accepted. Origen said that God had sown truth in the world, but had let mankind arrive at it by the slow instrumentality of human research. Education has opened the mind to receive it; but has also given us the defence of distrust. Is it something real that has been brought to light; or has merely a new name been given to an imreality? lliere is a good deal in that observation in Wilhelm Meisteff that books generally do little more than give our errors names. In distinguishing error from truth, the educated man finds more difficulty in choosing his course than the uneducated man, and much more than the half-educated man. Breadth of view is the great gift of education. This mxsettles as well as settles the mind. It keeps it in a habit of comparison. A college does for us what travel does. It changes our horizon every day. It does also what travel cannot do. It shows us the horizon which limited EDUCATION TO aTIZENSHIP 9 the view of the greatest men in every preceding age. Astronomers tell us that the earth in her course about the sun is continually coming nearer and nearer to it; that her orbit narrows as the cycles of time pass by. It is not so with the free mind of man. If the current of human thought, as the centuries nm on, tends to return upon itself; if lost arts are rediscovered; if the atomic theory of Lucretius is reproduced by modem chemistry; if the evolution of things of which Goethe spoke as a poet, be again proclaimed by Darwin as a natural* ist; the educated man sees that the old subject is taken up with a new power. It is carried farther. The sweep of the mind is ever centrifugal. Measure its range by such periods as befit the problem, and it never narrows. Were there dark ages? Yes. But how small a place belongs to them in the two hundred thousand years during which man may have inhabited this planet! In the grand words of St. Peter, ''one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day." We are probably still m the beginnmg of human history. We are learning still the elements of knowledge. But the discovery of each has been part of a con- tinuous process. It takes, as it comes, its appointed 10 THE RELATIONS OF place in the kingdom of human thought, whose history links us to the divine, and has no reference to time: — no reference, except that at any moment when an expression of that thought by one man is to be judged by another, the judgment will be false unless that whole history be taken into view. We get in collie a start towards the highest things of knowledge. If we make the most of it, they will become ours. But an acquaintance with the highest things of knowledge is not necessary for the educated man. He is educated, who can raise himself above the common level of the conmiimity by making common things his own, in the fullest sense. It is not his dead self that he stands upon, but his living self. He has received, and he has assimilated. lliere are who receive; and give out nothing. Education, in imparting power, involves, as has been said, corresponding responsibility. The edu- cated American has received the same citizenship as the uneducated American, but he has, in taking it, accepted a far heavier weight of duty. He must hanmier the anvil. He must be an intellectual guide. He ought to be a moral guide. He may, highest of all, be a spiritual guide. He will be, in the truest sense, so far as he throws his spirit into those aroimd EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 11 himi — his spirit of earnestness and sincerity; of ardor and enthusiasm; of devotion to a cause, and to the leader of a cause. It is in these directions that the best education spends itself, and justifies itself. It is so at every stage, — with primary education as truly as with secondary education. As Emerson says: Each man is nothing else than a capacity for justice, truth, love, freedom, and power.^ It is the supreme office of education to ascertain how best for each man to strengthen and elevate that one capacity; to feed it with what it is able to receive; to give it, as it grows, free course and glory. This it may do for each of us. The dullest needs it most and profits by it most. But education cannot re-create the man. We are not all bom equal. The value of a man, like the value of a mill-stream, depends upon the head. No training can give either of the qualities which, as Lecky says, lead to the most splendid successes of life: — tact and judgment, by which one is enabled to seize opportunities and make the most of them. The best that college can do in those lines is to strengthen the judgment, where it is feeble, by ^ Journals, 127. 12 THE RELATIONS OF enlarging the horizon of view, and to lead to what may appear to be tact, but is only the observance of wise social conventions. Every young man, whatever may be his native gifts, suffers from the want of sufficient standards of comparison. In critical moments, he does not know what others have done when such moments came to them. He does not know what are critical moments, for he cannot measure cause and effect in the full light of history or of philosophy. In- creasing years will help him, here, and education, more. But he who has had the advantage of superior training in addition to tact and judgment, bom in him, is a trustee of great possessions. He has in- herited great things and he has also that which makes them of the highest worth. He is one of those answerable for ten talents, because ten have been committed to him. He must not shirk the public duties, which they impose. Neither can he look otherwise than with admira- tion on the men whom he may meet in public life who have educated themselves. The Franklins and Shermans, whose reading was at odd hours, and self-directed, became entitled to the name of edu- cated men in the fullest sense. They had missed EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 13 much, but they could afford to miss much, because they had acquired much. llieir birthright of power was also, in some points, a title to public favor and confidence. The self- educated man often has more influence over the general public than those who have received a collegiate education. He was bom with superior talents. He has added cultivation. He stands head and shoulders above the crowd, and yet he was bom one of them and bred one of them. They feel that he is their natural master. One who, with equal talents, has been educated by others wins such a position with far greater difficulty. He can win it, however, and it will be his own fault if he do not; probably a fault of manners. One obstacle which, in a country like ours, lies before him to be conquered, is a tendency among many who have had no collegiate education to look on those who have, as mere theorists. The educated man is always a theorist, though he may dislike to be called so. But what is a theo- rist? As applied to questions of government it may mean the man who has the widest horizon, who knows the most of the historical experience of nations, who judges not by what has been the suc- cess, real or apparent, in his own time, or his own 14 THE RELATIONS OF land, of certain measures, but by what have been their effects in all times and all lands. Such an one is familiar with underlying principles. Goethe said of Seneca that. he saw Nature as an uncultivated man; since not it, but its events, in- terested him. The scientific theorist looks beneath the surface. He looks back, as well as forward. The most popular cry, not only to-day, but al- ways and everywhere in American politics, is for progressive policies. Our people have no patience with mere stand-stills. They know that all life is motion, and that that of society always ought to be and can be motion forward. But it is often not an easy thing to distinguish between advancing and retrograding forces. Who can best do it? The man who has had scientific instruction in those general ideas which are com- mon to all scholars of all countries and, we may almost say, of all times. He has read the books which the world has sifted out as worth saving from the libraries of three thousand years. He has been shown what experiments men have made in political government, and with what success. He has been taught something of what we call philosophy, — the science that concerns itself with the reason and principles of thing^ and men. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 15 He has learned to read history in that spirit. To the average man the history of his own country is valuable for itself. The main events which it records, and a few great facts of universal history, he ought to know, even if he cannot discern their relations and dependencies. But to the historical scholar, who can study them philosophically, they assume a meaning which enables him to be a true teacher of the people. He will ''speak forth the words of truth and soberness." No scholar is a ranter. The power of education is a steady rather than an impetuous force. It is unfavorable to enthusiasm. It does not carry points by storm. It may appeal to feeling, but it is because it sees a reason for so doing, rather than as a natural outburst of one who cannot do other- wise. Education does not make extremists. It compels consideration of both sides of a question, before adopting a definite position in regard to it. As a result, the educated man will be apt to be neither a conservative nor a radical. He knows too much to be wholly satisfied with either policy. He knows that whatever in human politics b new is simply a re-adjustment of what is old, or a not unnatural development from it. He knows, too, that whatever in human politics is old is also dead, 16 THE RELATIONS OF unless susceptible of re-adjustment to what is new^ or capable of developing itself from within into something new, with the help of new environment. The noisy praters about new truths and new political discoveries, are generally those who, if they have tasted the Pierian spring at all, have not drunk deep at it. If they knew more of the past, they would know more of the present. They would be less eager to add incongruous appendages to an- cient institutions, and more mindful that the incon- gruity between the less and the greater is always eventually fatal to the less. In this lies one great and peculiar opportunity of the educated American in the twentieth century. It comes with the rapid increase of immigration from Continental Europe. Our people are daily recruited from those bred up under very different political institutions. The new comers know little of ours except that they assure large individual liberty, and also permit the free association of any who aim at social or economical change. A large part of them are distinctly socialists in the extremest sense. Ordinarily the foreigner who settles here believes that this is a land of opportunity, but does not know how it became such or is maintained such. He does not know how much he owes to our law. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 17 He knows very well what impediments it put in the way of his entering the country. He is not predisposed to look on it with favor. Goldwin Smith, in speaking of the Neapolitans, said that "when the law has been for centuries the enemy of the people, the people become the enemies of the law." Of those who now come to us in such great numbers from Southern Italy and Russia and Northeastern Europe, many have grown up with this inborn and hereditary feeling of enmity to law. They do not ask government to redress their wrongs. They prefer to do it themselves. They are apt to prefer a resort to pistols and knives, to bringing a law-suit or filing a complaint with a prosecuting officer. It is this way of looking at our legal institu- tions that leads so often to their abuse of the right of organized labor to strike, by resort to mob violence and arms to aid it. They and their children must be taught the value of what they find here, and what it cost those from whom it has been inherited. Education teaches how to reach such men and also how to influence public sentiment in respect to them. As to this, everyone who has been taught their language has a special responsibility, but all who have studied the history of their coimtry, or 18 THE RELATIONS OF of the world, are in a position to do them, and through them the community, substantial service. We wish for the perpetuity of American institu- tions. If it comes, it will not be from the persist- ence of the original stock of the first settlers. It will be from the persistence of their ideas of govern- ment and law. The American race, except in the Southern States, is rapidly becoming a composite one. But in Ameri- can institutions there has been shown a great as- similative power. £]specially is this true of our system of popular education. It is given by edu- cated people. It offers, at least, the beginnings of knowledge. The common school bums away the dross of alienage, and fuses gold with gold. The school teacher is the truest friend of constitutional government in the United States. He was, in the Southern States, before the civil war, the most dangerous man, as respects their system of social organization. He has been regarded with similar apprehension in Russia. There untU recently no peasant could lawfully be taught by any one in more than a certain and closely limited number of speci- fied subjects. A violation of this rule was a penal offence. A despotic empire, in other words, did not dare to let the common people acquire more than EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 19 the rudiments of knowledge. To teach them more might render them less compliant subjects. The South remains of the old American type, be- cause the foreigner seldom seeks a home there; and he seldom seeks it, because of the inferiority of its schools and the practical monopoly, out of the large cities and manufacturing centers, of negro labor. There is less immigration also in the Western than in the Eastern States. The immigrants come across the Atlantic and prefer to settle near one of our great ports on that ocean, so that they can easily return to their native land. It is, therefore, to the East that the growth of a foreign population here is especially important, and brings peculiar opportunities to public men. The power of appreciating and grasping oppor- tunities, whether in this or any other direction, is greatly strengthened by a superior education. It gives something to measure by. The people know this, though it is true that to fasten upon a public man the name of a scholar in politics is still to dis- credit him. If he be a scholar and nothing else, the world is quite right, should it put him aside for what it calls a practical statesman. One thus charac- terized may be a scholar too, though making less 1^ 20 THE RELATIONS OF parade of his scholarship. But it is more likely that, well as he may work in a narrow field, he is incapable of enlarging it. He will generally be familiar, at most, only with local and recent history, — with the articles of political science of the day, not with the reasons and conditions out of which they have been formulated. If one of the school of ''practical statesmen'' rises to high office, it will generally be found that his advancement has come largely from his combin- ing good judgment with great powers of literary composition. He comes to soimd conclusions, and can tell why. He can tell why so plainly that every- body can follow his lines of thought, and compre- hend exactly what the positions which he maintains are, and to what they lead. Some men seem bom with the gift of expressing themselves clearly and to the point. To every one, education gives a certain facility in this regard. It is a strong weapon, in strong hands. The power of the pen in influencing political action is nowhere greater than with us, because, in view particularly of oxu* law of libel, nowhere else is public discussion equally free. Under the common law of England, the criticism of public men is much more restrained. Here the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 21 candidate for public office by popular election, though it be a judicial one, must expect personal attacks and be able to repel them with vigor. Here also the platform is assuming new impor- tance from the spread of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Where a people legislates as a whole, without the benefit of such discussions as belong to representative legislatures, they must have brought before them the reasons for or against the measiures, upon which they are to vote, in the clear- est way, or the whole proceeding will be a mockery of justice. So in every State a printed appeal, signed by influential men, to the electors, to vote for leaders who are committed to certain policies, will have great weight, and he who can put such a paper in the best form will do good service to his party and indeed to the community; for it will stir discussion on a high level and call for answer. Such an appeal must be well-written, in order to catch the public eye: clear, concise, vigorous, earnest. It must be signed by men who command public confidence. Their names must be judiciously arranged. It must appear at the psychological moment, when it will be likely to prove most effect- ive. It must be pubUshed in such form and way 22 THE RELATIONS OF as most surely to reach those whose votes it is de- signed especially to influence. A well-trained mind, and a well-trained mind only^ can meet all these requirements. We are considering the responsibilities and op- portmiities of Christian citizenship and how educa^- tion helps to meet them. Sir Edward Bume-Jones said that the rule of Christianity was to make the most of your best, for the sake of others. No one can imderstand clearly how to do this, without the aid of education. That, in showing us the relations of things, points the way towards shapmg our relar tions to others so as to make them of the fullest mutual benefit. What we have to say to them, it helps us to say clearly. What we have to do for them, it helps Us to do effectively. What we have to fulfil of public duty, it helps us fulfil in a way to seciu'e a public benefit. The man, for instance, who reads French has an opportunity at hand every day to use his knowledge by studying at first hand the original records of the development of modem life in France. He does not have to wait imtil somebody else has selected which of the new books by French authors is most likely to sell in America, and then makes a translation of it, — very probably an inacciu'ate one. He makes EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 23 his own selections, and his own translation, on the instant, and if he is really familiar with the lan- guage, catches without fail the true meaning of the author. Our government, at one time, fell into a serious misimderstanding with that of France, because in a despatch from Paris, in which the word demande was used, it was translated by the clerks in our State department as meaning not request, but demand. The man who has been taught to read German has a still wider opportunity, because it is a language less known to Americans than the French; and the student of Italian, or Spanish, or Dutch, an oppor- tunity in that respect yet more great. Every foreign nation can teach us something in the field of politics, — something to follow, or something to avoid. Nor is an acquaintance so gained with the institutions of foreign lands, ever without a certain enlargjng power over the nund of him who acquires it. His theories are broadened, if not corrected. He can measure better the limits of his own knowledge, and see better where he needs most to extend them. He rises towards the level of a citizen of the world. In these days both of altruistic tendency and of increasing intercourse between nations, such train- 24 THE RELATIONS OF ing as universitied can give strengthens capabiUties for statesmanship as never before. Prince Bismarck once said that a third of the students of German universities broke down from dissipation, and a third from overwork; but that the other third ruled Germany. As one looks over the lists of the Presidents of the United States, the Cabinet officers, the rolls of Congress and the rosters of our State government, he is soon satisfied that the graduates of our Ameri- can colleges and universities rule America, and that it takes more than a third of them to do it. In other lands there are ruling classes, by law, or custom, or social causes lying deeper down. Here the only ruling class is that of educated men. They rule by their merits. The people know that out of them those to fill high places must generally be selected, and know, also, that there is a solid reason for it. The educated man be^ns his active life in the world as a capitalist, and a capitalist that can never be bankrupt. Capital, existing in any honest form, bring? respect. It also brings responsibiUty. The capitalist is boimd to use his capital. Every man, to be sure, is under a similar respond- EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 25 bility in kind. Every man's powersi native or ao- quiredj are his capital and part of the capital of the whole community. But to most men this capital is negligible in quantity, as compared with that which a liberal education gives. The possessor of that^ above all others, is imder bonds to serve the public to the measure of his opportunity, and to put his whole strength into whatever he may under- take. If he withholds any part of it, he wastes what is a substantial part of the capital of the world. If he withholds none, he will not be without his reward. The sweetest thing in life, outside of the gifts of home, is to have power and to feel that you are exercising it well. Burke said that political society was a partner- ship of the living and the dead. The living are mainly engaged in administering an established business. It is established on the contributions of Ihe silent partner, — a partner eternally silent, — the dead. The active partners will succeed or fail according as they hold to what is good in the es- tablishment, as they received it, and get rid of what is outworn and antiquated. They must be able to distinguish between the profitable and the un- profitable. They must know how to make up the cost-sheets. 26 THE RELATIONS OF Only the educated man can render to the public the best service in these respects. Only he who knows the causes of things can speak without fear and without favor. "Fdix qui potuit remm eognosoere catuaa, Atque metu» omnes et inexorabiie fatum SubjecU pedHms strepUvrnque AdteronHa awriJ' EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 27 II SHAPING EDUCATION TO CITIZENSfflP Db. Thomas Arnold, in one of his essays,^ writ- ten in view of the passage of the Parliamentary Reform bill of 1832, discusses with his accustomed force the shaping of education to citizenship. Every man, he said, from the highest to the lowest, has two businesses. One is his own particular calling, to which he looks for a livelihood. The other is his general calling, which he has in common with the rest of the people, namely, the calling of a citizen and a man. Everybody admits that he must receive a special education for his special calling. Why is it not equally necessary that he should receive one for his general calling? It is not generally deemed equally necessary, because the consequences of not receiv- ing it are less obvious and direct. A tailor who has not been taught to make a coat decently will get few coats to make. He is written down a failure, from the start. But a man may be very poorly ^ Miscellaneous Works, The Education of the Middle Classes, 375. 28 THE RELATIONS OP jQtted for the duties of a citizen, and yet perform them after a fashion, in such wise that nobody will think much the worse of him for his deficiences, and few will perceive them at all. On the other hand, a good education for citizen- ship is more important to a coimtry, such as ours, where the choice of rulers is in the hands of the people than a good education of certain of its people for certain particular callings. It can flourish without good artificers. It can buy mechanical productions from foreigners. But it cannot flourish unless it is fairly well ruled, and it cannot be ruled fairly well save by those who are chosen for their offices with some kind of discrimination, and guided in their administration by a soimd public opinion. Citizenship in a republic, by its very nature, carries with it a peculiar duty and power. The education of a king is planned with the main purpose of fitting him to govern well. It is too much to ask that the education of every citizen of a repub- lic shall be planned with the main purpose of fitting him to govern well; but it is sadly defective if it is not planned with some reference to just that thing. He is a sharer in the power of sovereignty. His vote is as powerful as any other man's. His education has been, so far forth, a failure, if it has EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 29 not taught him the principles on which he should exercise this sovereign will^ and the directions in which it should be exerted. While only one of many kings, he must be brought to feel that, in a sensei his fellow citizens are his people. Each of us also is a citizen of the world, and each educated man, of necessity, contributes to the forma- tion of that public opinion which is coming so largely to regulate the character of international relations. The old-fashioned college education, before the system of elective studies received any great ex- tension, was distinctly a training for the general calling of a man and a citizen. With the universal contraction of that system during the last few years, it is regaining the same character. But no incon- siderable part of the political vagaries of the past forty years may be traced to a onendded education in special topics of political economy, sociol6gy, or governmental administration. The coU^e graduate of a hundred years ago, and of fifty years ago, had been compelled to scatter his attack upon the citadel of learning, rather than to concentrate it. He scrutinized its walls from all sides. He was taught to take rapid and large views of large subjects; to get general impressions; to have a little knowledge of many things. 30 THE RELATIONS OF The college graduate of the last generation choee what studies he liked best^ or thought would serve him best. In those he may have acquired great proficiency; — in those and perhaps in nothing else. I have heard of a doctor of philosophy, who not many years ago was graduated from one of our leading imiversities, after presenting a thesis con- sidered of great merit, on some minute subject of investigation. In a casual conversation with him, soon afterwards, he was asked his opinion of the line of thought in In Memoriam. He had, it was foimd, never read the poem, nor ever heard of it. Such specialization brings danger to the State. The men who have been its subjects have looked so long on narrow lines that they can only see straight in front of them. They must get breadth of vision before the people can take them as safe counselors. Our educators have now found this out. They have changed their methods. They have come to group elective studies, in such a way as to substitute their own judgment to a large degree for that of the Freshman or Sophomore. If the student is allowed to specialize in the field of politics and constitutional government at too early a stage in his college career, he starts on his life voyage with an ill-loaded ship. It is out of EDUCATION TO CmZENSHIP 31 balance. He exaggerates the importance of the particular branch, to which he has dedicated his main efforts. This may be pardoned in one who is taking a graduate course. It may almost be en- couraged, for only a certain enthusiasm and devo- tion, bred of deep conviction that his work is important to others than himself, will make a thesis, written as the condition of a doctorate in any faculty, quite worth its cost. But the Freshman occupies no such position. He is recording no self-achieve- ment. He has discovered no new theory. He has foimd no new point of view. He has rescued no half-lost scrap of the learning of antiquity. The first two years of a college course, it seems to me, should be largely given to enforced study in those fields of general information in which all educated men ought to feel somewhat at home. They will be precisely those fields which tend to produce good stuff for public service. Probably some of these studies will be distasteful to many. The pursuit of none will be thoroughly agreeable to all. But the mental discipline which comes from studying what one does not like, — what one finds hard and repulsive, — is of the highest value. James Martineau, in his old age, remarked that the college study which had done him the greatest good was 32 THE RELATIONS OP the higher mathematics, and that he chose it be- cause he hated it. Every student is not a Martineau. The tempta- tion is strong, wherever choice is free, to take the easiest work. The re-action from the elective sys- tem of the latter part of the nineteenth century has already proved itself justified by its results. Its best characteristic is that, on the one hand, it has not been too violent and, on the other, that it has not been limited by any blind adhesion to standards of antiquity. They are not to be looked at as in- violable, though one must feel his way, and move slowly, in planning any changes in methods of imiversity instruction. He must take short views, and pay constant regard to present conditions, not forgetting that one retains only that which he can assimilate. As times change, colleges must, to some extent, change with them. The relative values of different studies will inevitably vary. No age can justly assume the right to prescribe what shall be the subjects of public instruction in the next. The end and objects of education can be approached through widely different curriculums. It was not until the sixteenth century^ that 1 In 1502, at Wittenberg. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 33 Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught in any Euro- pean university and, one after the other, ever since the beginning of the eighteenth, they have been giving place, as studies necessary to a proper train- ing for life, to others belonging more closely to the modem world. Among these, such as pertain to the organization of human society, have steadily grown in favor. With every extension of the right of political self-government comes a new call for instruction in the art of self-government, — a call never so imperative as since the widely-spreading use of the direct primary, the initiative, the refer- endum, and the recall. The imiversity exists largely for social culture, and ''social culture is the training of the individual for social institutions." All institutions have a political bearing. Their influences for the good of the people will be constantly challenged by some. They often become the subject of party discussion, and this in turn, will call for the consideration of the class-room in the university. , The teaching on public questions ought to be positive. The student ought to know on what side his instructor is ranked. Then he can guard him- self the better, from being carried away, and weigh the doctrines set before him with more precision. Of course, the instructor will refer to the main 34 THE RELATIONS OF authorities^ leading to opposite conclusions. But he will lose in power, if he does not dogmatically assert his own belief and urge it as the true one. Certain things have been reasoned out by former generations to the end. They are settled. The process of attainment is now of slight importance, in view of the result. Certainty has been reached. The early years of College must be largely given to imparting these certainties. The student's time is too valuable to allow us to encourage him to work out the problems anew. A solid stepping stone has been created. It is for him to use it as such, without first stopping to ask where it was brought from, or how it became so firmly imbedded in the soil. He is being trained to use facts. He must first know facts; and the facts are, in the beginning of a liberal education, more important than the process by which they were ascertained. In Rousseau's flmUe^ he is insistent on the prime necessity of laying down rules of conduct for chil- dren, without giving them a reason for any of them. Let them learn the rule and the impleasant con- sequences of breaking it, first. Explanations of grounds, on which it has been adopted, may better be left to future years. He would have had little patience with a modem school of pedagogy which EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 35 would spend itself in teaching the child to reason out for itself the propriety of each step, the merits of each rule. There is a story, which ought to be true if it is not, of a little girl so trained, who was asked how much seven times six made. ''O, dear," was the reply, "I worked over that a week, last Winter. I made up my mind it must be either 40 or 42. I've forgotten which, now, and I don't care, for our class has got through multiplication." I beUeve in teaching the ordinary child the multiplication table^ before teaching him the reasons for the statements which it makes. I believe in teaching the student of language, in school and college, to leam by heart the conjugations and de- clensions as so many ultimate facts, and let com- parative philology come later, if it come at all. I believe that there are facts dominating the treat- ment of questions of public right and individual duty to the State, which in school, and in early College days should be stated and dwelt on as finali- ties, with more reference to what they are, than to how or when men foimd them out. The work of the first two years of College, in the direction of civics, has for its legitimate end, not to make great statesmen, but to make good citizens. This is necessarily fostered, in some degree, by coUege 36 THE RELATIONS OP life. Submission to a collegiate discipline prescribed by a superior authority is an excellent preparation for that submission to a broader discipline which characterizes life imder a system of liberty regulated by law. Obedience to authority is taught best, no doubt, in military institutions. It is the redeeming feature of the great military establishments of Con- tinental Europe. But it may be learned sufficiently by every college student to seem to him a natural guide in the future discharge of civic duty. Respect for those in authority, and for the law whose ministers they are, cannot be taught too fully to the young. Civics as a subject of study, may be, and often is. In giving instruction in that, there is a constant temptation to go too far. The field is familiar to the instructor by force of what he has picked up from his own experience and observation. There are probably some things in it which have struck him as of particular importance. He naturally wishes to explain these to his pupils. It is a pleasure to him to do this. Every teacher, who is worthy of his calling, enjoys sharing with his more advanced classes whatever is connected with the topic under consideration which, at the time, especially interests him. He is thus in danger of hurrying them on beyond their strength, and of giving them more EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 37 than they caa profitably receive. There is a rule of ''accommodation" mider which every true teacher works, whether he has ever heard of such a rule, or not. It is what forces him to present the subject which he has in hand so that it can be ap- prehended and accepted by those who know less about it than he, and who would certainly fail to comprehend it in its true meaning and relations if he gave it to them in all its fulness, as it appeared to him. But there are principles of our political system which a child can fully master, and historical facts underlying it, which he can be made to remember and to reason from. The public schools cannot begin too early to call the attention of the children to some of the political characteristics of the land they live in. It is easy to teach them that there are no kings on the Ameri- can continent. It is easy to teach them to respect the flag of the United States. The youngest in the school room can join in singing ''America," and he will soon want to know who the pilgrims were. By the time the child is twelve or thirteen he can appreciate a good deal that distinguishes his country from others in its institutional aspect. He can appreciate more, of its simpler characteristics. 38 THE RELATIONS OF than is generally told him by his teachers. In fact, the weak point in our American system of education seems to me to be in giving, in the earlier school years, too little information about necessary things, and perhaps, in the later school years, too much information about unnecessary things. By the time that the preparatory school is reached, civics can be taught scientifically, but never fully. Scientific methods require that the classes, even in the highest forms, should be made to imderstand that any such instruction can, at best, be only elementary and partial. A serious danger lies in the very excellence of our S3rstem of public education. It may lead those tramed under it to think their knowledge greater than it is. What they have too often learned is, in the words of Mr. Bryce, "sufl&- cient to enable them to think they know something about the great problems of politics, and insufficient to show them how little they know." But no boy of sixteen need leave the academy or high school without some clear notions of what free government means; of the outline history of his own State; and of the fact that, as fully as the United States are sovereign within their sphere, is each State sovereign within its sphere. From twelve to twenty, no year of a boy's life, EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 39 while under instruction in school or college, ought to pass, without some distinct endeavor on the part of his instructors to prepare him for the public duties, which he is soon to take upon himself. Where children are of foreign parentage this is doubly true; but every American also, bom of native stock, ought to be taught and re*taught something of the strong and of the weak points of our political system, and how the weak, though they exist, are over balanced by the strong. Let them be led to admire their coimtry, and look up with reverence and affection to her great men of former generations. Hero-worship is a natural tendency in student years. It gives history its light and patriotism its inspiration. Americans are fortunate in having had men like Washington and Jefferson; Nathan Hale and Abraham Lincoln. To every school-boy they ought to be familiar char- acters. In admiring the great men of his country's history, he enters a path that naturally leads to admiration of the form of government which so many of them helped to frame or to develop. Let him be helped to see what its essential and char- acteristic features are. There are certain absolute notions of the nature of law which serve as a basis for the institutions of 40 THE RELATIONS OF every nation. No man's life in that nation can be well-ordered, if he does not know what those notions are, and does not look to them (even if desirous to replace them by something better) in a sympathetic spirit. The education which does not make clear what are the fundamental characteristics of the form of civil government under which those who are the subjects of that education are to enter on the duties of citizenship, is radically defective. No foreigner can become one of us unless he con- vinces the court of naturalization that he is attached to ''the principles" of the Constitution of the United States. He must know what they are, be- fore he can feel such an attachment. Much more must the native citizen have that knowledge. It requires no long courses in Constitutional law or American history. A hundred words will tell the story. It is enough if the student is made to understand that American institutions rest upon individual responsibility, without respect of persons; obedience to law; religious liberty; free schools; security to person and property from all unjust attack; no privileged orders; such equality of opportunity as laws can properly assure; home rule through the several States in most things; a strong national EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 41 government as to a few things; short written Con- stitutions, republican in form, distinguishing these things in outline; a power in the judiciary to dis- tinguish them in detail; a general, but not rigid, division of the powers of government, whether State or national, between three departments, ex- ecutive, judicial, and legislative, the latter to be commonly administered by a legblative assembly; and an indestructible union of indestructible States. Something like this may be his '^ shorter cate- chism." I speak of course only of what it is necessary to learn in order to comprehend the groimd-work of American govenmient. But there is a ground below every ground-work. The ground of hope for the permanence and vitality of our political institutions is the honest purpose, the manly character, and law-abiding habit of mind of the American people. There is a sentimental quality that attaches to the best methods of instruction. No education g^ves a proper preparation for citizenship which does not strike the inner chords of the student's nature. The heart directs the mind. At least it chooses for the mind. It acts more quickly. The moral feelings of a people are their main safeguard. The moral quality of their leaders is 42 THE RELATIONS OF more important than their mental power. A good character, no doubt, is largely the subject of in- heritance and early environment. School, to an American, forms a large part of that environment. If it is made to teach, and if our Colleges are made to teach, directly or indirectly, the good of reverence, of honor, of loyalty, of truth, of social courtesy, the foimdations of civic duty will be well laid. Too much care cannot be taken in selecting teach- ers, at every stage of education, to pick out those, so far as possible (and it is possible oftener than is sometimes thought), whom their students can admire for deeper qualities than those of scholarship. A Freshman at one of our leading colleges was asked, some years ago, how he liked a certain member of Faculty. " He has no heart," was the reply. I dare say that it may have been simply the case of one who did not "wear his heart upon his sleeve"; but to give such an impression to any one is a grave misfortune. It has been said that what a boy loves, when he leaves school, is worth more to him, and to the nation, than what he knows. This is quite as true of the College graduate. Indeed what we, any of us, know is only important to teach us what — of the ideal — to love And what to abhor. No word EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 43 of regard for a teacher from a former pupil is so rewardf ul as that which tells of impressions for good made on the man's general character. A statistician of authority has ascertained that there are two States which lead and have long led all others, relatively to their population, in respect to the number of their citizens to whom distinction for their merits is accorded by common consent. They are Massachusetts and Connecticut. It can hardly be doubted that the cause is the possession by each of an ancient university, where for centuries her sons have been trained in the acceptance of high standards of learning and high standards of morals. I would place these two kinds of standards side by side. If they are not of equal importance in the making of a man, it is because, of the two, in the planning of a imiversity, guidance in morals should be made the highest aim. Nor, probably, can morals be best taught except by the light of religion and the study of the principles of Christianity. Here the university resting on foundations of endowment, like Yale or Harvard, offers better opportunities than do those supported by State appropriations. The limits of our constitutional prohibitions re- specting religious freedom are somewhat vague, and there is a ''twilight zone" into which it is dangerous 44 THE RELATIONS OF for those to venture whose positions may depend upon the favor of each new legislature. No such zone embarrasses those who act under private char- ters. Nor do imiversities accepting the benefit of the Cam^e Foundation, in disclaiming a sectarian character, surrender the power to teach religion. I would not be understood to deem religious faith or professions essential to the highest morality. For most men it finds support in these, but it may have a life of its own, that is totally independent of their aid. A university succeeds ill if it does not make plain that on one ground every honest seeker after ulti- mate truth can find room to stand, — the groimd of ethics. The ethics of one age, one country, may not be those of the next; but in each and for each there will be some standard of conduct which it is happiness and glory to attain. The scholar may accept materialism as his philosophy of life. £[e may believe that death ends all, so far as continuity of individual existence goes. He may find no suffi- cient evidence to convince him that there is a God. But he will never deny that, if it be necessary to establish a utilitarian basis of ethics, connected in some fashion with the enduring good of the individual man, such a basis exists in the satisfaction of every EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 45 man, while living on earth, who has the mens sibi conscia recti, and in the not unwarranted hope of some men that they will be remembered on earth after they have left it, with affection, admiration, and reverence. Whatever be our theories of the Future, it is something worth achieving if, when we leave the Present, there are those who will thus hold us in living memory or fond respect. The loving recol- lection of a dead mother, the fond respect of his country for a Washington, — what uncounted im- pulses to good flow out from sentiments like these, the educated man will see: no other can.. The university offers to impart knowledge, and cultivate the power of reasoning, but the great office of knowledge and reasoning is to be a^ means of reaching something higher — the plane of a pure and lofty and well-ordered life. That this is the end, it may fairly be expected that every teacher will assume. Whatever may be his views of religion, he must agree that all education is directed ulti- mately, as Mill has said, to making each of us practically useful to our fellow creatures and elevat- ing the character of the race. A by-product may be facility in perfecting material things. The real object is to perfect Man. 46 THE RELATIONS OF Sir Richard Jebb has said that ''education con- sists in organizing the resources of the human being/' The resources are there. What is needed is to organize them so as to secure the highest power for the highest service. They must be organized so that they may respond to sudden calls. Nowhere is this ability to act both promptly and wisely in an emer- gency more wanted than by men in public life. They will find help, for one thing in a cultivated imagina- tion. He who can best anticipate possible con- junctures will be best able to meet them if they occur. The educated man goes armed with general conceptions^ and is thus equipped to encounter any particular difficulties. But emergencies seldom occur. What is of most importance to him is to have a keen sense of the everlasting, heaven-high distinction between right and wrong, — a distinction never more vital than now. In all instruction in ethics, it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the student that it forms, of necessity, in our times, part of the foun- dation of any sound political government. It cre- ates forces that act and re-act, with unerring accuracy. Aristotle treats of ethics first and poli- tics second, because, he says, the good life can only be fully attained by the citizen of a good EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 47 State. Only he will live in an atmosphere that naturally inspires it. Altruism is a high form of political duty. It is fostered by familiarity with those principles of civil government which we call the "Ideas of 1789/' and upon which our American Constitutions are built up. First among these is the maintenance^ so far as may be, of equality of opportunity. The main office of the American State is to ^ve to each of its citizens a fair chance to make the most of him- self. Hence we are each willing to sacrifice some- thing of our liberty and property. It makes what we retain more secure. The strong thus serve the weak; and the rich the poor. Modem government all over the world occupies or steadily approaches this position. If we trace back its history, we shall find that it arose out of some pre-existing form of society which rested on a very different ground, and made its object prac- tically, if not avowedly, the aggrandizement of a particular individual or family, or class, at the expense of the rest of the people. This upward trend of human government cannot be too strongly pressed on the attention of young men. They must be made to feel that, as American citizens, they have inherited a peculiar obligation 48 THE RELATIONS OF to maintain and advance this principle of equality before the law. They must be taught that it by no means involves the acceptance of what, under the name of Socialism, is becoming steadily and every- where a larger and larger figure in national and in local politics. The strength of Socialism is largely due to a certain cloudiness of doctrine with which its supporters surround it; and to its remoteness from the life of the day. The clearer the light that can be thrown upon it, the better the chance of making its real nature plain. He can best conceive what it would prove in practice, and look ahead to the best purpose, whose training has made him look back far enough to comprehend the necessary relations of the future to the past. No one deserves the name of an educated man who has not been thus prepared to deal intelligently with the different theories of State Socialism. Here his knowledge of history will serve him in good stead. He will know the difference between Communism and Socialism; between Socialism and Syndicalism, which is its travesty; and he will know how to explain it to others so that they will understand it. He will be able to refer to instances in which the fundamental principles of each system have been put to the test of practice, and have EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 49 failed to sustain it. ''Knowledges/' says Lord Bacon, "are as pyramids, whereof history is the basis." No university, in the world of our day, can prop- erly omit thorough instruction in civics and the art of government. But this is especially true of the American universities founded and supported by the State. Their rapid increase in numbers, both of students and faculty, cannot but call attention to their especial and paramount duty to give in this way a proper preparation for public service. To them the State gives all. From them it may justly demand all. It has founded them as institutions of good government. They fail of their pmrpose, if they do not promote it by giving to State and country those fitted to serve each, as occasion offers, and to uphold each against all unmerited attack. Such men are best produced by those universities which are most thoroughly permeated by a spirit of sincere devotion to truth, and a high sense of duty. The president of one of our colleges, not many years ago, urged, in a Commencement ad- dress, the cultivation of this spirit. Truth was the one goal for every. student to aim at, always and everywhere. It was to be pursued unfettered by 60 THE RELATIONS OF attachment to any particular doctrines or tenets of the past. If these were good, they could not be held too fast. If they were bad, they could not be dropped too soon. He is not now the president of that institution, though he holds a much higher station. He said to a friend that he had not got half through this address, before he saw from the looks interchanged between the trustees and digni- taries who sat about him upon the platform, that his term of office was nearly finished. The university education that is thus limited at its sources, by those who control the sources, cannot rise higher than its springs. It ^ves no breadth of view, no real sense of public duty or of private duty; and this is simply because it is in no true sense education, but the mere pretence of it. The most thorough course of study, under men of the highest attainments and the noblest char- acter, may bear little fruit, or bad fruit. We must not exaggerate the importance of what is called a liberal education. It puts in our hands a certain capital to trade on. But it is not every one who can be entrusted with the charge of capital. Our best qualities and powers are God-given. Education may improve, but cannot create them. With respect to public office, I had rather have in a EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 61 difficult but subordinate place, a man of first rate ability, who had educated himself, than a man of second rate ability who had been educated by others. It may not be so for the first places. There the sobering influences of historical knowledge and philosophical study have a double worth. They strengthen the capacity of judging between courses of policy, and tend to guide towards the safer side. They must have convinced the man that all great governmental changes will take place slowly, if the change is to endure. They have convinced him that the presimiptions are against a change, from what has been tried and found fairly good, to that which has been untried. The man also is magnified by his office. He feels that he stands for and acts for the whole people. It weighs upon him, and it also inspires him. A second rate man in the highest station often grows into another being. If he has had a good education, and has never shown himself able to make effective use of it, his official opportunities may teach him this last lesson, and teach it well. Public speech plays a large part in public service. It helps immensely to secure what is good, and to prevent what is evil. That which we hear impresses most of us far more vividly than what we read. It 62 THE RELATIONS OF is also put together in a very different fashion. Rhetoric has one set of rules for spoken words and quite another for written words. I have already spoken of the help which education can give towards acquiring the art of literary com- podtion. To write well, whatever endowments nature may have bestowed, requires discipline and practice. But many more can write well than can efpeak well. Nature makes the orator, and she makes few. Facility of utterance on the platform or in a legislative body, to one who has clear ideas back of it which he desures to enforce, is a great gift. Education seldom creates, but can always enrich it. Declamation, both at school and collie, debate in student societies and class or college meetings, tend directly to promote one's public usefulness in later life. Participation in such exercises teaches some that their part is the grace of silence, and some that they have a talent well worthy of cultiva- tion. Let the declaimer and debater look with con* fidence to their instructors for good opportunities to improve their gifts, and kindly sympathy. Whoever can talk well before a large assembly, on a subject which he has studied to good purpose, will always be counted among the important men in the community where he belongs. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 63 The growth of our cities, the multiplication of our village centers, the many organizations of a social, or economic character, which our age has developed, all tend to elevate the position belonging to the public speaker. There are more places of assembly, and throughout our country there will seldom be found any great gathering where a serious word, well said, on public questions of the day, will not be well received. And now, as I close, let us ask where rests the responsibility for marking out the lines of American education. Is it a divided or a centralized responsi- bility? Have we one or many authorities to which to look? The shaping of education is in the hands of the States, and there it must remain. The Bureau of Education at Washington may make and often does make helpful suggestions, but it can exercise no control, nor can any other officer or agency of the United States. The German principle of trust- ing the several States of the empire, not that adopted by Japan, of leaving all to the imperial government, is in harmony with American insti- tutions. We believe that systems of education must be under home rule, and conform to local needs and capabilities. They cannot be identical 54 THE RELATIONS OF in Massachusetts and Montana; in Charleston and in Chicago. The demands of educational freedom are abso- lutely opposed to Federal direction of school affairs, and endangered by all grants of aid from the Federal treasury. The agricultural colleges of the country are now, to some extent, sources of peril to the autonomy of the States, in respect of their internal concerns. They familiarize the minds of the stu- dents with the idea of Federal dependence, and introduce an extraneous authority to determine policies of instruction imd research. The education of Americans must be American in type. It must impress upon all who receive it our combination of local home rule in most things with supreme control at Washington over a few things. Each is equally necessary for the perpetuity of our institutions. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 66 III THE EDUCATED MAN AS A VOTER, AND PRIVATE CITIZEN The first duty of the educated man as a voter is to vote, were it only for the sake of the example to others. The elective franchise is one which he who receives is bound to make use of. It is no mere privilege. Its exercise by the citizen of a republic is, under ordinary circumstances, almost his highest obligation. In several of the early American colo- nies, not to vote was a penal offence. It is to-day in Belgium,^ Salvador,' and some of the Swiss can- tons,' and Austrian provinces.^ Georgia put such a provision in her first Constitution (Art. XII), and it remained in force from 1777 until 1789. A vote, however, cast from no higher motive than the desire to avoid a fine, will be apt to be ill- bestowed and, in any event, to be carelessly given. ^ Ck>nstitution of 1893, Art. 48. s Constitution of 1886. The elective franchise is given to those who are eighteen years of age. * Schaffhausen, Zurich, Aargau, Thurgau, and Basel- Landschaft. ^ Silesia, Moravia, Upper Austria, Lower Austria^ Salzburg and Camiola. 66 THE RELATIONS OF Compulsory voting tends also to lessen the number of men who withhold their support from an un- worthy nominee of their party. It is far easier for them to keep away from the polls, than to go to them and either scratch his name or vote for the opposing candidate. By all who deem independence of party dictation to be desirable, the absentee, under such conditions, should be recognized as acting within his right. This is not to say that his course is to be com- mended. Not to vote is always, in a certain sense, a violation of a trust. The voters in any community are, and must be made to look upon themselves as being, trustees for the rest of their fellow citizens. They are in a minority always. Every electorate is in theory an aristocracy. It is the expression of a distrust in absolute democracy. Children are not capable of governing their own affairs. Much less, therefore, can they safely be allowed to share in the government of public affairs. Until they reach the age which by common consent is deemed to be that of reasonable intellectual maturity, they are clearly not the best material for a voting constituency. The best, if we accept the principle of universal suffrage, is such of the rest as are not properly excluded from the privilege EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 57 of voting for their personal defaults, or — in the opinion of the community — by sex or race. Assmning the soundness of this principle, it is true nevertheless that the vote of each educated man counts for more than that cast by any other person. In Belgium they recognize this by ^ving three votes to those having a diploma from an institution of higher learning, or who have completed a course of secondary education of the higher kind, or held some position, public or private, the occu- pants of which presumably possess at least the knowledge given by such a course.* But everywhere, under the broadest rule of uni- versal suffrage, no vote is intrinsically so important as that of the man of superior education. Presuma- bly he knows better than those who have had less instruction what policies deserve support. If he be a man of sense, all who come within the range of his acquaintance give him credit for possessing such knowledge. They look to him, consciously or un- consciously, for guidance. His vote, in this way, counts for more than one. He may safely start from the position, Quieta non moveri. The presumption in an American State is in favor of the existing order of things. It is a 1 Constitution of 1893, Art. 47. 58 THE RELATIONS OF presumption, however, which has less weight than it should with the people at large. The American mind has been formed in the school of enterprise and success. The United States, in a little over a hun- dred years, have passed from a position of weakness to a commanding place m the circle of the great powers. They entered the nineteenth century lack- ing in capital, with a sparse population, and few large business concerns. They entered the twen- tieth, with a population of ninety millions and great business interests spreading over the world. We have tried many experiments in legislation, and most of them have turned out well. Why not try more? Progress is the hope of the world. We have passed some laws that made for progress. Why not, think many of the people and say not a few of their leaders, seek a further advance in a similar way? Here a recurrence to fundamental principles is especially necessary, and true leadership calls for insistence on the peculiar virtue for us of those, which have been made the foundation of American government. That vu^ue is not discerned by every- one; not easily discerned by anyone. By the edu- cated man it may and should be. He is not necessarily a reformer. Every political party which is worthy of long life has a right wing EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 69 of conservatives^ a left wing of radicals, and be- tween them a large body of those who are neither the one nor the other. In each of these three divisions men of education will be found. To ardent and hopeful spirits the left wing is the most attractive. It is also the most dangerous, because it has the least benefit from the teach- ings of experience. In advocating changes in laws, it should be remembered, as Joubert said, that **Presque Umt ce que nov^s appdons un abus fvi un remide, dans Us institutions politigues" Reform is a good object to aim at, if the new form proposed is really better, and far better, than the existing form. In most cases, if it be not far better it is not worth while to press its adoption; and for two reasons: first, because Reform is a cry of en- thusiasm, and we can only be enthusiastic in striv- ing to attain something far higher than ourselves, — and second, because we may lose more than we gain, if we unsettle existing foundations which are fairly good, by calling attention to their faults, in the hope only of making a slight improvement. The rank and file of reformers are always sciolists. If their leaders are properly educated and equipped, all may go well. But if the leaders are sciolists too, all is lost from the outset. 60 THE RELATIONS OF A man of that description is often the hardest worker. He lives by faith. He is intoxicated by his enthusiasms. He is nerved by the fixity of his convictions. He is incapable of seeing the objections which stagger wiser men. He may thus do im- measurable harm, in securing what seems to him immeasurable good. It is a great misfortune if he have the training of an educated man, — powerful, but incomplete, — to aid him in his crusade. Es- pecially is this so, if his efforts are directed against any vital part of our constitutional system. In such case, his every word should be taken as a call for the general forces of education to rally, in op- position, for the defence of American institutions. The vital problem on which thinking men in every modem government are constantly at work is how to maintain individual freedom and inde- pendence without crippling the effectiveness of the great commercial organizations by which the large business of the country is carried on. These organi- zations are almost entirely, and from the first have been, corporations created by the State. Our Constitution contemplates freedom to every citizen or association of citizens to enter into trade between the States, as well as in the States. It also contemplates the regulation of each of these two EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 61 kinds of trade by different governments, the State regulating its internal trade and the United States regulating that between the States. A corporation is an association of individuals under a common name, and generally they. are citizens of the United States. Shall we abide by this scheme which the fathers of the republic devised? Can we safely depart from it? Every well-instructed American has read enough of history to know that ours is the first successful attempt to frame a government with a central sovereign power, supreme within a narrow sphere, and numerous smaller sovereign powers, each su- preme within a larger sphere.* He of all men ought to feel that the safety of American institutions lies in maintaming this combination in working order. Whatever party ties he may acknowledge, he is imtrue to his country if he is not outspoken in de- fence of this method of distributing power. It is indispensable to have a strong government at ^ Europeans, and particularly the Germans, often deny, in the face of what we have done in this direction, that such a combination can leave any true sovereignty in the smaller power. An academic school of American jurists sympathizes with their position; but it finds no support in the decisions of our courts, and these are our sailing-chart. See Willoughby, Principles of the Constitutional Law of the U. S., 6. 62 THE RELATIONS OF Washington to deal with matters not open to the States. It is equally indispensable to preserve the sovereignty of the States in matters that are, imder the principles of the Constitution, confided to them. Our American system of higher education natu- rally tends to establish a belief in the truth of this last proposition. It is a system created and ad- ministered by the States, and by each State for itself. It differs widely in the East from what it is in the West. The common schools all over the coun- try are conducted on a plan much the same; but between the State University and the endowed university there is a great gulf fixed. This cannot but be felt by their faculties and students, and it predisposes them to feel that here, at least, there has been found no need of Federal control. There is, however, a strong counter influence in the oppofflte direction. American scholars look out on the world f roip a height, — that on which their education has placed them. They observe that the tendencies of modem political thought in most coimtries are towards greater and greater cen- tralization of power in the hands of one man or a few men, subject to checks by the people, either by direct vote or through their representatives. The EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 63 educated man is especially liable to be affected by the currents of world-politics. He knows most about them. He naturally wishes his own country to be in line with the advance elsewhere of political thought. I do not think he always appreciates how the dif- ference in history and conditions between the United States and Europe renders impossible here, imder our constitutional system, much that is possible there. He can, on the other hand, more fully than most others, appreciate the inmiense sentimental strength that has gathered about the office of President of the United States, and its influence in developing the spirit of nationalism, as opposed to maintaming, unabated, the sovereignty of the States. The chief magistrate of any political government, as of any ecclesiastical government, stands for the govern- ment, for the State, for the church, whose head he is. The loyalty and reverence due to that naturally flows out in large part to him. He is identified with it. To cherish such sentiments and to eiqpress them is right and useful, so far as they promote national- ism within proper bounds. But the bounds of nationalism with us are narrow, and — what is not less important — it is a short step from nationalism to imperialism. President Lincoln took it, in the 64 THE RELATIONS OF arbitrary arrests which he sanctioned, during the civil war. All our Presidents first and then Congress have taken it in ordering the affairs of our colonial de- pendencies. They were right in taking it, for the Constitution of the United States is a Constitution made for the people of the States that are thus united, and not for subject peoples. But what Jefferson found it so natural to do when the Louisi- ana purchase was made, and what we have found so easy, if not necessary, to do, on a larger scale, in the Philippines, by establishing there an imperial government, is silently sowing seeds of imperialism at home among those unused to nice discriminations in political theories. The President of the United States is the one representative of the country and of every State as to the outside world. He only is in direct com- munication with foreign powers. He only directs the course of troops and ships of war. He is the embodiment of national power. He bears the Might which to most men is the perpetual symbol of Right. Shortly after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had completed its work, a lady, meeting Franklin, asked him whether this new Constitution EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 65 would give us a republic or a monarchy. "A re- public, Madam/' was the answer, ''if we can keep it." * We can only keep it, — keep it, that is, other- wise than in name, — by maintaining the dignity and sovereignty of the States within their spheres, and by steadily resisting all unnecessary extensions of Federal power. Here is the opportunity and the public duty of every educated man. He may act in that direction effectively, whatever be his party aflSliations. No political party has ever pledged itself to what it deemed improper and unnecessary extensions of Federal power. There have been, almost uninterruptedly, two great parties in the United States, though each has, from time to time, gone under different names. One has been generally in favor of a stricter con- struction of the Federal powers; the other of a more liberal construction of them. President Hadley once said that that system of government has the best chance of long-continued life, which allows the highest degree of individual variation, without destroying authority as a whole. It is so, still more, with political parties. Those which endure are those which are broad enough in ^ Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, III, 85. 66 THE RELATIONS OF their beliefs to comprehend many men of many views, widely differing from each other, and yet each resolved that such differences shall work no division. If the educated man has not learned toleration he has not learned much. He of all men can best afford to identify himself with a party, for he knows that it involves no sacrifice of his ideals to a level of uniformity. It may be his duty to hold back. It may be his duty to push forward. It is always his duty to recognize the right of others to do the same, although they may be moving in the opposite direction to that chosen by himself. In England it has often happened that parties have changed their ground, and are found in one generation advocating what, in the preceding gen- eration, they opposed. There has been little of this in the United States. The Republican party of to-day is in the main a descendant of the ancient Federalist party. The Democratic party of to-day is in the main a de- scendant of the ancient Republican party. Neither party has been always and uniformly consistent in its platform assertions, but the main principle of each has been well known. However near the right wing of one of these parties may approach the left wing of the other, the main bodies will remain EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 67 apart. They will remain apart for solid reasons. Elaeh represents a tenable theory of American gov- ernment. In the course of our political history the people have trusted each with power. Educated men have belonged to each, and with good right. Educated men have generally controlled each, and generally will. It would be a sad day for American institutions, if a great party should ever rise up, the vital principles of which no educated man could honestly and rightfully support. Such an event I view as almost impossible; but should it occur, that party would not remain long in power. The forces of education would disintegrate and de- stroy it. The educated man should always and everywhere stand for the doctrine that a member of a political party is not necessarily pledged either to vote for every person whom his party may nominate for office, or to support every measure which his party platform may urge. He is — or should be — a member of that party whose principles on the whole best commend themselves to his judgment. It may possess some which he deems unsound. If so, he should maintain his liberty to oppose them, without forfeiting his general party allegiance. To vote for everything which his party may hurrah for, in the 68 THE RELATIONS OF wild excitement of a political convention, is no necessary part of his duty. He is to be never the servant of a party. His party is his servant; — his, as one of the people for whose benefit government exists. He supports it because he believes it is the best party to serve the public interests. Spinoza identified the slavery of man with the strength of the passions, and the freedom of man with the power of the reason. Yielding to the force of political emotion and party pressure simply en- slaves the man whose reason tells him to resist and oppose. So a man of superior education betrays his trust, if he looks on his party as giving him, as to any matter of right and duty, a means of going incognito, and avoiding political responsibility. He must come out in the open and let others know his convictions, wherever there is a moral question to be decided. He must judge the situation for him- self. Parties are not devices to save men from the vexation of thinking. One moral question is attendant on every election to important office. It addresses itself especially to campaign managers, but it vitally concerns every citizen. How far can money be Intimately used to secure a party victory? It i§ fashionable to look at corruption in elections EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 69 88 a necessary incident of our system of govern- ment. The educated man knows that, when it exists, it comes commonly from excess of political ambition, or from abuse of official power. Rous- seau said, in the days of eighteenth century parlia- mentary boroughs, that in England men were only free on one day, every few years, when they voted for members of parliament; and that they made such a bad use of their Uberty on that day, that they deserved to lose it, and had lost it. We have no Crown ready to buy votes. We have, with the spread of civil service reform, continually fewer and fewer offices to be the prizes of political success. We can stamp corruption out if and as a public sentiment is created that condemns it and all ap- proaches to it, unreservedly. The educated man can do much to forward that result. He can work effectively in that direction, though holding no office in State or party. Talking with one's neighbors, or writing a letter to a newspaper, is often more productive of ultimate results than a platform speech or caucus resolution. Public busi- ness is controlled by public sentiment, and public sentiment is what private citizens think, and feel, and say, in the ordinary intercourse of daily life. It is this that colors and indeed makes the life of the 70 THE RELATIONS OP nation, and educated men have it in thdr power to interpret and to lead it. Public opinion needs an interpreter. It also needs safe guides. The place of education is in the front ranks of all real national advance. It is one of the first causes of that advance. It has the right of the line. But all advances are not real. It is for the educated man to find out which is, and which is not. It is for him, next, to take his rightful part in the support of the one, and the defeat of the other. It is never his duty to urge the passage of laws, however soimd in principle they may seem to him, which he can see that the mass of the people do not want. His duty, under such conditions, is, first, to ask himself seri- ously if the majority are not in the right, and, if not convinced of that, then to labor to build up a pub- lic sentiment calling for such legislation. In that his education puts him on a high vantage ground. There is always an inarticulate cry, proceeding from the mass of the community, for something better than they now possess. What this is, they may half feel, but do not know, and cannot put into definite expression. To do this is the work of the educated man. He must be their voice; and he who is will find himself their leader. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 71 There will be such leaders in great things. There will also — what is more important — be such leaders in small things. Few can help a whole people, by rising to the place of a national figure. Many can and do render what, in the aggregate result, is as great a service, by leadership in the im- provement of local conditions, and the support of minor measures that pave the way toward great reforms. It is in this larger company, that every educated man owes it to society to take his part. He owes it to his own generation by whose co-operation his life and liberty and property are protected. He owes it to the next generation, for whom ours must prepare a place. He owes it to past generations, to whose endowments he is generally indebted for a large part of his education, and of whose acquire- ments and literature he is an heir. This debt he ought to pay with interest. He must do his part to make the conditions of life better in the future than those which he has known. He must try to do for his successors in the community what his predecessors did for him. You and I must pay our debts of inheritance, to use the words of David Ritchie, "by endeavoring to hand on to those that shall come after, the privileges we do not enjoy.'' 72 THE RELATIONS OF They will be the privil^es of freemen. They will be equally open to all. The educated man is bound to exert his influence to guard the rights of the people and the community, as a whole. He must, be he a specialist or not, conmiand a wider horizon than can most of those around him. He can see that to favor class interests is seldom to promote public interests. He can see that what seems to the advantage of a particular city or country or senatorial district may be a damage to the State at large. He can see, and see more clearly, if a private citizen, than if in public office, that the office of a representative in a legislative body is first of all to represent the entire people, rather than any particular locality, and that the electors have no just right to expect from one whom they have helped to put in office any greater con- sideration for their special interests, because they and he live in the same town or county. In speaking of class interests, I would not be ' understood to recognize the existence of any social classes in the United States. The term ''social classes" is justly applicable only where political society has established various kinds of personal status, involving some kind of subjection of those having one kind to those having another. American EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 73 government recognizes no such institutions. The educated man ought to set his face against any appeal to '' class-consciousness." There is no ground for the existence of such a thing in the United States, and can be none, because with us there is no social class into which or out of which men cannot pass at wiU, unimpeded by law. In dealing with any questions of such a sort, a well-trained mind is of special service. Every educated man observes society through a magnify- ing glass. What is microscopic or invisible to most, stands out in his view large and clear. He sees qualifications of dogmas, shades of meaning, at- tachments to propositions. If, in the phrase of the day, there are "strings" to them, it does not escape his observation. His business is to give his contemporaries, so far as he can, the benefit of this acquired power of his. He has, in this, something akin to the faculty of the artist; whose function it is to show us how much the ideal rises above the actual, and shines through the actual, to those who have eyes to see. The man in private station will often if not always, in attempting this, find a kindlier audi- ence, than if he occupied a public position. He 74 THE RELATIONS OF stands, apparently, on the same level with all whom he addresses, and he speaks with an unselfish interest. The best office of an educated man is to give high and ennobling ideals to his fellow citizens. They are needed in our age of conflict with a materialism armed with so immense a power, more than ever before. He must first have them, himself; and he can, if he make good use of what has been taught him, — if he take himself at his best. A few "high hours," as Emerson called them, come in every life. It is to enable us to attain them that the rest are given us, and it is our business to make them more and more productive, every year. No way is better than to cherish them with the hope of passing them on to other men. The educated man is no good citizen imless he exerts such influence as belongs to him to build up the general character of the commimity and strengthen its moral motive. Rousseau, in La Novr veUe HiU/Lse, makes one of his characters say that suicide is a theft from the hmnan family. Such a theft also, though in less degree, is conmiitted by every one whom society has trained in the higher learning, and who then allows himself to become so self-centered and self-surrounded that, though EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 75 retaining his life, he exerts no effort to make it useful to others. A liberal education, obtained at any American college is, in part at least, an unearned gift. The State may be the giver. Past generations may be. But however this may be, the student never pays for what he gets, when he gets it. The debt re- mains, and the resulting duty to pay it later, when he can. He pays it best by rendering that service to others which it has put it in his power to give. He must be a leader in making the most of life for himself, and in helping others to make the most of it for themselves. He knows fairly well his own capabilities. He must convince his neighbors of theirs. He must show them their possibilities of self-improvement, and the real secret of a strong and fine life. For one thing, that is self-control, with its fruit of freedom from fear. The wise man, said Emerson, in a storm at sea, ''prays God not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear." It is the storm within, which endangers his true life, not the storm without. This may be an esoteric lesson, hard to learn; but a practical rendering of it for every man is that there is no ground for dreading ruin from the success of any political party in State 76 THE RELATIONS OF or nation. History assures us of this as a permanent characteristic of American life, and the historical student must share his knowledge of it with those around him. When any large public question is under discus- sion, the possessor of a strong mind and high at- tamments has some such opportunity, and it is well worth his while to use it. Man always is at his best when he interests himself in politics; using that term in its original sense, — as that which belongs to the government of a community. To do this was virtually forbidden, in the older forms of political society, to all but a favored few. In our country it has, from the first, been possible for every one. The American, then, who does not interest himself in politics renounces his birth- right. Having a right to show himself at his best, he is content with the second best. If the uneducated man is found in this posi- tion, he has some excuse. He knows his weak- ness. He dreads to assume the labor of studying problems of difficulty, with an imtrained mind. The educated man has a kiiger responsibiUty. His training has been for the purpose of help- ing him to make the most of himself, — the most of life. It is doing that, to exercise a whole- EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 77 some and intelligent influence on the politics of the day. How shall he, as a citizen, labor to the most purpose to better the State? There is something not wholly unattractive to a man of powerful and well-disciplined mind m such a philosophy as that of Nietzsche. May it not be so that the true worth-accent of hiunan life ought to rest alone on its highest examples, and that the only important thing to forward is the higher advancement of those abeady most advanced? Shall we believe with Carlyle that the history of the world is the biography of great men? The student of large social movements will be more apt to de- clare it to be the story of the average man and the average level of the community, in every genera- tion. Certainly it is so in a country such as ours. This is a natural consequence of republican institutions. Every American citizen is to a certain extent a public man. He has an equal share in the sover- eignty of his State and nation. He is called on to approve or disapprove by his vote at the next election the manner in which the sovereign power has been exercised by the men in office. It is for him, as much as for any other man, to say whether 78 THE RELATIONS OF they — ^ or their party — shall continue in possession of that power. Every American citizen, therefore, is under a special obligation to school himself in respect to the nature of government, — its limita- tions and its possibilities. One fundamental conception he must grasp firmly, — and the better educated he is, the more firmly, because it may seem illusory. It is this: There is not one and the same standard for the individual and for that association of individuals, which we call the State. The government may, in case of need, sometimes do — and do fairly — what to anyone of its people would be unpermissible and illegal. Take, for instance, the rules of property right. Under these the State can fairly and properly give itself special privileges. Let us suppose that a taxpayer becomes financially embarrassed. The State can and commonly does insist on a preference for taxes due, over his other creditors. The public debt must be paid to the last cent, even if it con- sumes the man's entire estate. So the management of the post office is a government monopoly, and we have laws which very properly exclude, imder pain of fine or imprisonment, all competition from those desiring to set up a private mail. So far forth, our policy is frankly socialistic. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 79 Where^ again; the government is in a position^ through its executive or legislative departments, to deal with the claims of individuals complain- ing of wrongs, it can act even in violation of what in courts would be the unquestionable rules of justice. Congress, many years ago, granted bounties to sugar growers. The courts were appealed to and decided that such legislation was unconstitutional. But meanwhile large siuns had been spent by the sugar planters, in reliance on its validity. Congress thereupon appropriated as much as the bounties would have called for, to save them from ruin. The courts were again appealed to, but they held that Congress could thus recognize the equity of the planters' claims. It was simply doing what an honest man's conscience would, under similar circimistances, make him do. A similar position was taken when the United States consented to set aside a judgment of a commission of international arbitration rendered against Mexico, in favor of certain claimants who had deceived the arbitrators by false testimony. They had transferred their claims to bona fide purchasers, who had collected the award. The United States nevertheless refused to be even a seeming party to such a fraud, though 80 THE RELATIONS OF at the cost of repaying the sums in question to Mexico out of the national treasury.^ On the other hand^ the educated man can see why nations may be or seem selfish in situations where a private individual might not be able to quiet his conscience, should he act in the same way. The nation is a trustee for all its people. To give up or give away what is theirs may be a breach of trust, in essence, though not in form. It is, there- fore, generally the duty of a government to stand upon its rights. So far as concerns private individuals, the en- forcement by government of obligations between man and man rests mainly upon the courts. The educated man owes it to his education to do what he can to strengthen public confidence in our judicial system. It has brought peace, order, and security to our people, but most of them have a very im- perfect knowledge of the reason why. They do not understand that courts have created the dignity in society of the individual man, by giving him the aid of the whole people, if necessary, to enforce his rights. They may not understand that it would ^ La Arbra Silver Mining Co. 9. United States, 175 United States Reports, 423; Moore, International Law Digest, VII, 68. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 81 be hazarded, if not lost, were judicial decisions to be controlled or revised by popular majorities, ob- tained, as often they surely would be, by the efforts of defeated litigants. Life consists in sharing a succession of relations between men. One of these relations is that of the itggregation of all the people inhabiting a particular territory, represented by its civH government, to each of these people individually and to each of the groups with which these individuals may be identi- fied. Each individual in a civilized state, so far as he can be said to have personal rights against other individuals or groups of individuals, is a person created by civilization, under the influences of religion. Primitive society is a group or a combination of groups. The group is a personaUty; the combina- tion of groups is a personality; but the individual at this stage of human development is not a personal- ity. Organized society does not deal with him. It deals with his group. If he commits a crime, it looks to his group to punish him. If he acquires property, he acquires it for his group. If his services are wanted in war, they are called for by his group. Modem government has come, through the in- fluences of civilization, to recognize the individual 82 THE RELATIONS OF as a political personality. It recognues him as having rights. It assures them to him, and does this no longer by the action of a particular group, but through courts, superior in force to any group, be- cause they are backed by the force of all the people in all the groups. To support the authority of the courts of justice, then, is one of the first duties of every citizen. It is for the educated man to show him why. History tells, or rather the philosophy of history, and that must be taken at second hand by most men. Only the educated man comes to know it at first hand. Only he can speak with authority of what courts are, or any other of the institutions which, during thousands of years, have been the slow growth of social evolution; yet those alone are the real foundation of the State. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 83 IV THE EDUCATED MAN IN PUBLIC OFFICE Mbn of superior education fill the higher offices in our country, in a proportion far in excess of that which they bear, as a class, to the rest of the com- munity. The higher the office, the greater is this proportion. Of the twenty-three men who have been elected Presidents of the United States, only seven, — Washington, Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Taylor, Lincoln, and Cleveland — had not had the advantage of a college training. While these in- clude three illustrious names, the list of Presidents, taken as a whole, although showing that native talent, high character, and good use of opportunity for self-improvement may carry their possessors to any height of power, proves also that the greatest stations in public life seldom go to men of middling ability, imless it has been disciplined and steadied by careful cultivation. Similar results are apparent in all the other lines of high public service. Dean West of Princeton has recently stated, that among our American youths who have gone to college, are comprehended nearly 84 THE RELATIONS OF a third of all who have ever been representatives in Congress, more than a third of all who have ever been senators of the United States, nearly half of our cabinet officers, and almost all the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. In the more important offices of the State governments the proportion of men of superior education is less, but still relatively very large. In the preceding lectures I have spoken of the reasons for this, and also of the duty which every educated man owes to his country to give her the benefit of whatever he has learned, to the measure of his opportunity. But in taking office he makes an essential change of position. He no longer speaks only for himself. He no longer has the same free- dom to follow his own lead. More depends upon his action. What he does is largely at others' risk. He has, therefore, less right of political independence. On the other hand, he now has better means of information as to public matters. This may change his views of political policy. He has gained a sounder basis of opinion. In most cases he was elected as the nominee of a political party. This implies a certain obligation to support the main measures which it is understood to favor. The educated man, like every other member of a party, has become such EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 85 because it^ on the whole, was the one best represent- ing the policies which he prefers. If he be put in office, it is because he belonged to it. He owes it something. If he were not ready to act with it, in ordinary cases, he was wrong in accepting office, at its hands. The President of the United States is the only public officer who may be expected to keep his mind wholly free from local prepossessions. The Gover- nors of States come next, but each of them is, in a sense, the appointed guardian of the special interests of the sovereign power whose head he is. If it be an agricultiu*al State, he must endeavor fully to protect the interests of the farmer. If it be a manu- facturing State, he must, in like manner, have re- gard to those of the factory. Above all he must stand for the constitutional equality and sovereign power — sovereign, that is, within their spheres — of each and every State. No one can see as plainly as the man of broad education how vital to American institutions it is that the balance of power between the States and the United States, and the equal measure of power held by every individual State, should be kept unimpaired. Lord Bacon, in his treatise on the Advancement 86 THE RELATIONS OF of Learning, said that the best of the public men in ancient Rome were those who ^'either, being con- suls, inclined to the people, or being tribunes, in- clined to the senate." So perhaps the educated man, holding high executive position under our dual system of government who, being a Federal official, inclines to minimize the sovereignty of the United States, or who, being a State official, inclines to minimize that of the States, does most credit to the education which he has received. ' The educated American has not an equal chance with the educated man in most other countries, to serve the public in a public way. We have no leisured class, with recognized opportunities and duties as to public service. We distribute even executive and judicial offices largely on a basis of locality. Goldwin Smith said of George William Curtis that ''imfortunately he lived in an electoral district where the opposite party had the majority, and thus, by the fatuous localism which the Ameri- cans have imposed upon themselves, he was de- barred from doing his best for the country." If such a man happens, by some stroke of public good fortune, to have an opportunity of serving the people, he cannot forget that local circumstances EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 87 are siwhys to be considered in shaping his political course. The representative in Congress, for in- stance, of a district ux which there are large manu- facturing interests benefiting by a high protective tariff, will find both employers and employees dis- mclined to a change of system which would, or in their judgment might, be injurious to them. How- ever advantageous to the country at large the lower duties might be, he knows that his continu- ance in office may depend on his resistmg the reduc- tion and, probably, what is more unportant to him, that he was selected and sent to Congress for that very purpose. Such considerations wiU not justify him in doing what he knows to be a positive wrong. They will rightly have weight in determining his duty in mat- ters where there is room for reasonable argument on both sides. Abstract theories are not always safe guides through practical conditions. They gather limitations as they proceed. The rule of Right may be invariable, but who is wise enough always to discern it? If to any leader of the people, however, it re- mains obscure as to some particular measiu'e or policy, that is broad and large in character, he may be reasonably sure that the people, as a whole, will 88 THE RELATIONS OF see it more clearly, and certain that they will cast their votes according to their moral convictions. Were this not so, our system of government would have fallen to pieces, long ago. But why is it so? What is the real source and strength of popular morality? By what lines of thought are these most surely ascertained? The educated man, in measuring the influence which he can and should exert, upon his fellow citizens, finds himself put to a choice between two schools of philosophy. Is mankind ultimately directed along its course by interior intuitions, or by exterior associations and experiences? If by interior intuitions, he who would serve as a guide to others has but a narrow field of metaphysics, bordered on one side by sentiment and on the other by rhetoric, to explore: if by exterior associations and experiences, his studies must be as wide as the world. There is no doubt as to which discipline it is the easier to embrace. There is none as to which is most identified with the f imdamental assumptions of our American governments. There is none as to which a£fords the strongest leverage to move a whole people. The people, as a whole, believe that certain moral EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 89 principles are innate in human character; that there is such a thing as a moral standard, towards which another thing that is within us, and which we call conscience^ urges us on; and^ finallyi that there is a God over all^ almighty and omniscient. Who- ever can best appeal to these convictions, and best squares his life to what they necessarily involve, will have the largest following in public life. He professes a philosophy which ennobles common thingSi and is apprehensible by the uneducated, as well as by the educated. It is a philosophy peculiarly adapted to uphold republican institutions. They suffer from the want of a visible sovereign authority. They furnish no king or emperor to personify it in all its fulness, and so to draw to himself the spontaneous loyalty and reverence of the people. Their adherents must then go higher, and claim that these institutions stand for perpetual truths, ordained of God. Of course, it is not intended to maintain that any political leader can ignore the force of human asso- ciation, custom, and experience. All men, and the educated man particularly, will necessarily have some acquaintance with it; and whoever under- stands it best will pay it the most regard. But the predominant philosophy of popular leadership is 90 THE RELATIONS OF that which rests on an inborn and unlearned sense of right and wrong. Right, with most men, is coupled with religion, and it is but a small minority of the people with whom religion does not coimt. The stars in their courses are perpetual witnesses to a realm of law; and few can watch them without a conviction that we are part of a larger order of things than we can measure, and an order established by a law-giver, who also made it possible for us to be members of it. Here in the United States, in our coimtry of popular education, the collective and intelligent opinion of the commimity upon any moral issue, clearly put before it, is, imder normal conditions, always well-motived. It is the fruit of the past, but has ripened in the present. Schopenhauer is wrong, at least for America, when he declares that "Jedea eimdne Akt hat einen Zwedk; das gemmnUe WoUen, keinenJ' The collective will, here, is always to uphold the right, — right as it seems to the community. And if education has done this for us, it can do it, in God's own time, for the world. The educated man will seldom fail to feel the far- reaching force of religion in hmnan government. He sees that the strongest foimdation on which to build up any broad measure of social betterment is EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 91 that of a higher morality. The State papers that appeal, in sincerity and truth, to these deep sources of power, carry the most weight. Here is the hope of the social reformer, if he gains political power. He may rely on the conscience of the people, and in a measure on the conscience of the world. life is a continuous adjustment, says Herbert Spencer, of internal relations to esctemal relations. We tend to be whatever our environment calls for. In proportion to our quick response to the demands it makes, is life sweet and strong and safe. The environment of each great nation is now the world. There is a law fit for the world, and at bottom there is but one. It is what we imperfectly describe as the divine law. We are perhaps not so sure as once, whether all that we thus name is what the world has claimed for it. The new philosophy of pragmatism makes us distrustful of abstract theo- ries, with its insistence that the best definition of truth is that which works best. Whether he holds himself a pragmatist or not, the educated man knows that the best laws to pass are those which will operate the most smoothly in daily practice. It is a truism that l^uslation must never be far in advance of public opinion. Law- makers are to find out that opinion and, as a French 92 THE RELATIONS OF writer has said, not so much by listening to those who speak, as to those who are silent. Most are silent. "The Forgotten Man" of Professor Sumner is the ordinary citizen. What public sentiment approves public senti- ment will respect, if it take the fonn of law. The freer the government, the more does such re&pect count for, and the more important it is that it should extend both to the laws and to those who administer them. Nowhere is this axiom of politics more self-evident than in a republic. American government rests on popular reepect for law. Respect brings obedience. The chief executive officers of our coimtry, our States, or our cities, stand before the people for the force of law. They should receive that respect which is a rightful and natural incident of their office. No one knows so well the importance of this as the educated man. No one feels it so deeply as the educated man, who occupies such an office. Human nature craves some embodiment of su- perior authority. It is never at its best in any man unless ruled by a spirit of reverence for a higher power. This spirit is natural m monarchies, par- ticularly if there be a national church of which the king is head. Decentralization in religious authority EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 93 and decentralization of civil authority generally go together; but not always, and never neces- sarily. They did not go together at the time of the Protestant Reformation, nor yet during the French Revolution. There, religious authority dis- appeared for the moment, but only to appear with accentuated centralization at the call of Napoleon. There is a universal longing at the bottom of the hmnan heart for something to reverence. The most ardent Roman Catholic may also be the most ardent lover of civil liberty. He needs it the more because he has voluntarily suirendered his religious liberty. It is the redeeming feature of European mili- tarism that it teaches respectful submission to au- thority and reverence for those entrusted with it. Great Britain and the United States stand apart from the other great powers in not providing such a source of obedience to law, and requirilig a resort to it. The British need it less than we, for they have a king who symbolizes authority, and whose elevation above all others is secured and fortified by the social traditions of a thousand years. It has led us to elect five Presidents of the United States because they had distinguished themselves in military service, and so identified themselves 94 THE RELATIONS OF with the flag, that the honor due to that came naturally to them. England, on the other hand, has only once in her parliamentary history ap- pointed one famous as a military commander prime minister, and the Duke of Wellington's tenn of office as such lasted but a year. For US| then, whose easiest opportimity for the culture of personal reverence and respect for per- sonal authority is gjven by service in the militia, or the army of the United States, it is the more im- portant to advance the dignity of high civil office. With no king to personify for a life-time the sacred- ness of the State; no hereditary nobility or gentry; no State church; the hunger of hmnan nature for something visible and authoritative to bow down before exaggerates the position of a great General, and therefore, needs direction towards those standing first in civil station. If they are educated men, they have so far forth the better title to respect, and they have the stronger appreciation of how much the show of that respect, as a social convention, does for the government they represent. The public men of om* country to-day are not less worthy to receive such regard, than were their predecessors in office. They have been schooled in a larger field. They deal with larger interests. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 95 In the first edition of the American Common- wealth, Mr. Bryce told us that those whom we called our statesmen were, as a rule, not types of the highest and strongest American manhood. Nor, he continued, is there much occasion in the United States for those classes of public men which are necessary in the great nations of Emope; for Europe needs, and the United States do not, those able to determine foreign and colonial policy, those who are apt at constructive work in social and economic reform, and those who can be efficient heads of departments. When, after twenty years, he came back here as ambassador from Great Britain, he foimd that all these needs of the old world had become needs of the new. Americans can no longer be content to trust themselves to the rule of parliamentary de- baters and platform orators. They have come to face large questions of colonial government, and world-politics; of substituting for the common law as to economic questions a statute law dealing with them from new points of view; of elevating federal bureaus to federal departments; and of multiplying each. There is occasion here, which thirty years ago did not exist, in a hundred directions, for careful 96 THE RELATIONS OF study by thoughtful and well-read men. They can- not but see that we are, with the growing solidarity of the worldi on the brink of a new social era. Its story is yet to be told. We cannot forecast it with any certamty. But it is to be an era of new politicsi which must be accompanied and brought in by a new ethics. The nature of political science has largely changed and broadened out during the last half century. Its aim formerly was to show how to fit the government of a people to the conditions of that people. It was something of local application. What it had of general principles was only important in determining the mode of such application. Then came the ocean cable, to bind the world together in point of time. The opening up of Africa followed, and the formation of the Congo Free State. Europe pushed beyond the fringe of civilization which in ten thousand years had hardly spread beyond the coast line, and marked off her new spheres of in- fluence. England seized upon ancient Egypt. France laid her hands upon Algiers, Tunis, and then Morocco, to be followed by Italy, reaching after Tripoli. Russia meanwhile has been creeping into China and Persia. Japan has entered the family of nations, and now holds her place among the great EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 97 powers. The United States buy Alaska; construct an isthmian canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific; assume a protectorate over Cuba; reach into Asia^ and seize the Philippines. China, Persia, and Turkey accept republican institutions. Political Science must meet these new conditions. The world feels this. The court of international arbitration, now established at the Hague, is its first effort to deal with world-politics from a world standpoint. But what principles shall this court apply? And what principles shall nations apply in their dealings with each other, which precede controversy or prevent it? President Hadley, in a thoughtful paper written towards the close of the last century, claimed for ethics the first place in political science. As political science expands, so must political ethics. There may be, and perhaps must be, as things go now, two kinds of ethics to be applied by the same science, — national ethics, and world ethics. The laws of any particular people must be limited and ruled by their own, locally accepted, standards of morals and conduct. The laws governing the dealings of one people with other peoples must be those of universal obligation. Here may at last be yet realized the thought of stoic philosophy, that 98 THE RELATIONS OF there b, could we only discern it, one law for all men and all things. The six Conferences held at the Hague during the last twenty years, two for the advancement and unification of Public Inter- national Law, and four for the advancement and unification of Private Litemational Law, have brought the nations of the world closer together than ever before, in the bonds of common rules of legal procedure. ''There shall not," was Cicero's prediction, "be one law at Rome, another at Athens; one now, another hereafter; but among all nations and in all time, there shall obtain a law one and the same." ^ Aheady jurists in several coimtries have prepared draft codes, looking to such an end. The latest, covering over a thousand pages, combines the project of a world-law and a world-government, through an international legislative and judicial assembly.^ They are pushing on in the development of theories faster and farther than the men in au- thority. But it is from private citizens that one always looks for the initiative in law reform and political progress. They propose and legislators 1 **Non erit alia lex Romae, alia AihenU; alia nunc, alia posthac; aedetajmdinnneagenteaetomni tempore, una eademque lex dbtindnt" ' New Code of International Law. Jerome Intemoscia. New York, 1910. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 99 select. The function of selection is more important than that of suggestioni and the faculty of dis- crimination which it demands belongs especially to well-trained minds. Those who possess them will also be apt to have the courage to maintain against all-comers a policy once deUberately chosen. The rapid extension dming recent years, of the principle of arbitration between nations by standing treaties is due almost wholly to the labors of men of superior education, in high office. What general canons of conduct, now, should be adopted by public men, whom education has lifted above the ordinary level of their fellow citizens? Such an one, after as well as before assuming office, will be tolerant. He knows that there is good in everything. He will not be borne away by mean suspicions. He will not hastily attribute bad mo- tives to political opponents. He will not readily believe that they are defaulters, or conspirators to achieve some scheme of public plunder. He will not be apt to charge upon all the low views of honesty that, in every community, characterize a few. He will not be always blind to what is sound in business life and social principles, and eager only to discover that which is unsoimd and unclean. 100 THE RELATIONS OF A dog has a remarkable sense of smeQi but I never saw one smeQ a flower. He is interested in what is rank or foul. He runs with his nose to the ground. There are men who act, according to their powers and opportunities, much in the same way. There are such men in high official station. But rarely are they educated men. Tolerance has its limits. There are unsavory things that cannot safely be overlooked. Class self-interest is one, when it aims to serve itself at public cost, for which there will be no corresponding public benefit. One of the heaviest responsibilities of official life is the obligation to stand up against the pressure of powerful organizations to secure special favors and privileges by law. Such organizations have great political influence; but it comes largely from the unfounded apprehensions of this or that party manager, who overestimates their ability to control nominating conventions, or the votes which they can command on election day. The people will be found on the side of any public man who makes it clear to them that he has been fighting their battles, by opposing the struggle of a class to profit at their expense. Public officers in America act imder a peculiar EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 101 responsibility by reason of the universal absolutism of the courts. In no other country does the judiciary hold as important a place as in the United States^ be- cause here they have — and under the protection of our institutions dare to exercise — the immense power of declaring statutes unconstitutional and therefore void. This prerogative belongs equally to the judges of the States and the United States. Any State Judge from the highest to the lowest can declare an Act of Congress unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it, in the same manner in which he could deal with a statute of the State/though subject to ultimate review by the Supreme Court of the United States. The bench must, therefore, as respects its higher positions, be filled by men having at least a fair legal education; and that, under modem conditions, calls for instruction in much that would once have been classed among what we have named "culture" subjects of study. But judges only pass upon the validity of statutes if they chance to be relied on as a ground of action or defence in some pending law suit. Many a statute stands for years without being thus questioned. Many of doubtful con- stitutionality are never attacked at all. The 102 THE RELATIONS OF possibility that the validity of any and every statute may be some day challenged in court throws, however, a peculiar responsibility on the American l^islator. He is himself imder an obli- gation, as complete as that resting upon the judi- ciary, to advocate no measure which contravenes the Constitution. He must study every proposition for a new law with this in mind. He must study it also with relation to all its consequences. Particularly is this true of propositions to amend one of our American Constitutions. A written Constitution is an organic and harmonious entirety. Whether well-planned or ill-planned, it is planned as a whole, each part in respect to the other parts. It cannot, therefore, be substantially altered in any direction without risk of its being thrown out of balance. An imwritten Constitution, on the contrary, while the fruit of ages, has grown up unsynunetric- ally and almost imperceptibly. To alter it is simply to continue this process. We Americans have a very different problem. Our constitutional amend- ments must, therefore, be more carefully con- sidered, and with reference to their remote effects, so far as these can be anticipated, by the most diligent thought and reflection. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 103 Here is a task in the performance of which the man of superior education in a legislative body has a great advantage, particularly if he have that great quality of a statesman, — activity of imagination. He can anticipate the action of the courts. He can stifle a wrong at its inception. It will be only by careful examination and pains- taking inquiry. The indirect consequences of any new piece of legislation are far more numerous and far more important than those which are direct. Only well-trained minds can anticipate many of them. And the highest education can never enable a man to forecast them all. In America one is quite sure that well-trained minds, sooner or later, will trace out these conse- quences. This falls to our Judges. They will be quick to see how an alteration in one of the rules of law may afiFect the working of others, because this will tell, in determining whether the new statute does or does not square with the constitutional guaranties of individual right. Often its effect will be found such as to produce a benefit to a few at the cost of injustice to the commimity. He who finds this out first, without waiting for some lawsuit to develop the wrong, has won a place among public benefactors. Still more of a benefactor is the 104 THE RELATIONS OF member of a legislature who perceives the imprac- ticability of some such proposition, before it can take the shape of law, and sees to it that it is rejected. Such a task is not an easy one. The sponsors of the measure will be ready to defend it, and plausible reasons for adopting it will probably not be wanting. The objector has not the spur of any personal end to serve. He is likely to be a busy man, with little leisure. It is to such men that the duty of opposition particularly appeals. They can discharge it more rapidly and yet more effectively than any others. Their mental machinery works smoothly, and without friction. Am I calling for time and thought which outrun the powers of most men, whether immersed in other business or not, in view of what the common routine of legislative work requires of all, and of the neces- sary duties of ordinary life? Taking on additional work of a new kind is often the best relief from doing that which regularly belongs to us. Indeed, is it not true that, when a man is found complaining of fatigue from overwork, it is almost always not because his load is too heavy to carry, but that his methods of work are wrong? The busiest man is the one who can best dispatch the most business in the least time. The busier the public man, the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 105 more readily and certainly can he push on to any end he has in view. The more readily also can he choose his ends, and reject ends proposed in selfish- ness or ignorance by others. He can penetrate shams at a glance. This is, in great part, the gift of nature, but education helps anyone to discern reaUties through pretences. Measures are often brought forward which pro- fess one purpose to achieve another. Educated * men ought to set their faces against lies in the shape of laws. Law is a sacred thing. Human law should be as near to the laws of physical nature, that is, of God, in simplicity, directness, certainty, and single- ness, as things of human make can be to things divine. One of our well-known religious newspapers said, in 1911, of the Federal corporation tax, in commenting on the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States affirming its validity, ''The law was frankly passed as a means of securing pub- licity and control rather than as an income bringer. It was intended to smooth the way to further legislation of supervision." These statements are probably true; but their truth reflects on the stand- ards of American morals. It is ethically indefensible to pass a law for one purpose, which professes quite another. It is using the highest power of sovereignty 106 THE RELATIONS OF to serve false pretences. It lowers the position of the sovereign power before the people. It tends to foster evasion of the laws and distrust of the law^ver. Has office, with all its burdens of such responsi- bilitieSi any true attractions for the educated man? To none has it more. Human happiness is to be busy over things serving a good end, that one likes to do, and can do well. To be able to render a public service in such a way is a high power, and carries a high pleasure. Education cannot alone create such competence, but it can always be of help in attaining it. It also aids one who may be in doubt whether to accept or decline a political nomination. It shows him the reasons on both sides. It makes clearer what there is in it to attract, and what there is in it to repel. It teaches that, in these respects, there is little change from one century to another. Public office is, in one respect, as rewardful, and in another, as unrewardful to an educated American, as it ever has been, or as it ever will be. Alexander Hamilton wrote of it, near the close of the eighteenth century,^ that its acceptance was a pecuniary sacri- 1 Letter of May 2, 1797, Works, J. C. Hamilton's Ed., VI, 244. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 107 fice to a successful man in professional life, which he could not long be warranted in making, because the opportimity of doing good was too small, on accoimt of "the jealousy of power and the spirit of faction." Power is no more the object of jealousy, and there is no stronger spirit of faction, now than then. In- deed one can hardly doubt that there is less. Wash- ington was vilified in his day as coarsely as any of his successors have been. Party antagonism, in New England at least, when Jefferson succeeded Adams, was far more bitter than it has been at any time during the last generation. The progress of world culture, the spread of altruism, the broadening of political perspective con- sequent on modem facilities foi: international inter- course, all make for less asperity in political contests, as they make also for wider opportimities for public usefulness in official station. The whole earth is our lesson-book in politics, and he does the most who reads it best. The power of reading it with understanding, it is certain that intellectual training helps to give. This is the constant assurance that sustains the educated man under the responsibilities of official station, and should make him, were there no other reason, ready to assume them^ if occasion offers. 108 THE RELATIONS OF The heavier those responsibilities, the greater is, or should be, the attraction to assume them, for they will give more surely opportunities for public service. To the educated man, then, who has the public good at heart, there is something to a high degree inviting in a position of large political power. Such a place is not to be gained at a boimd. It seldom can be, and never should be. Service in low station naturally comes before service in high station, and is the best preparation for it. The natural road to official usefulness and official distinction is to accept, or to seek, first, positions of service on party committees, or in the adminis- tration of local government, bringing no compensa- tion, except experience and the sense of duty done. The faithful and intelligent school visitor, or jiuror, or town committee man, will not be overlooked by the men in his party, when they wish to nominate a strong candidate for some higher place. He will also get into that practical touch with men and affairs which is vitally necessary to supplement a college education. Other opportunities for mingling intimately with the people are necessarily incidental to holding any conspicuous public station. Whoever is in such a place, if he have in any degree at all the faculty of EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 109 public speech, and few educated mea are wholly without it, is subject to constant calls to appear on the platform, or take part in celebrations and festivi- ties, of any and every kind. They furnish part of his opportunity for public service. The glamor of office excites interest in what he says and doubles its effect on the community. If he be a man of education, this makes him a man of better education. Naturally he will speak mainly of public affairs, and having to speak on them from a position which assumes more knowledge of their character and bearings than most men have, he is put on serious inquiry. What he says may go far on the wings of the newspapers, and he must feel that it is spoken under circumstances that carry no light responsibility. The author of any production in the nature of a book or a speech, which involves previous investiga- tions of fact or considerations of scientific principles, works to little purpose unless, while working, he has learned more than he has been able to tell. Who- ever interests himself in political affairs, and gains a position of influence in the government of his State or coimtry, whether it be influence in his party or in the actual administration of public fimctions, is certain soon to feel that he has entered a field where 110 TBS RELAnONB OF • lie is Iwuming more than he can ever impart, and more of good. No man of letters can long oceiqyy any conspicu- ous public station, without finding that he has acquired a dearer vision of political theories. He has been enaUed to test them in real transactions. He learns to discern better thdr vital prindples, and so thdr probable consequences. He naturaQy in- clines to study how measures of adminstration here compare with those of foreign countries, and he can hardly fail to find such study hdpful and suggestive. If he have any taste for authorship in literature, he may find in these ways a substantial opportunity to better the plan of government in which he has a share. A bill for a new statute may grow into a book. When Turgot was the Intendant of a prov- ince, two Chinese students attracted his attention, who were about to return to their home after a period of study under French instructors. They sought his counsd, and he took the trouble to write them (in 1766) a letter "on the Formation and Dis- tribution of Wealth," which was the foundation of a treatise that soon took its place as one of the great works of the world that discuss the prindples of political economy. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 111 Yet here lies a danger, also. The scholar in public life is under some temptation to give time to the study of political institutions, which belongs to the ordinary routine of official service. His main am- bition must be to perform the necessary duties of his position well, from day to day. That comes first. The newspapers tell us that one who has been the President of the United States said, not long ago, that the good of occupying that position was in the chance it gave to do some great thing. It would seem to me that a greater good was to be foimd in doing well the ordinary things, with which it falls to the holder of that, as of any other office, to deal. Whether a public station be high or low, it has its appropriate work, which must be done, most of it out of sight and little understood by the private citizen, but none the less vital to the public interest. The educated man in public station, who does justice to his education, will never fail to recognize the equal moral value of every act, whether it seem great or small, that his office may require of him. 112 THE RELATIONS OF THE EDUCATED MAN AS A CREATOR OF PUBLIC OPINION Thebe are two kinds of public opinion. One is self-produced or self-evident. The other is manu- factured. The manufactured kind comes largely from newspaper offices. It reflects the mind of the editor or proprietor. It represents the opinion which he wishes to prevail and, as the wish is always father to the thought, is likely to think to be really that of the general public. Editorials, no doubt, are among the causes that affect and create public opinion, but their influence is remote. The news- paper can plow the ground better than it can culti- vate it. like the work of the advance agent of a travelling show, the forces which it commonly sets in motion are soon spent. If they endure, it is be- cause the mind of the people has been really caught and expressed. The editor who is an educated man is most apt to succeed in such a way. He can see, through the incidents that attend and often obscure strong popular feeling, what is vital and lies deep below EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 113 them. But the power of place which belongs to the editor is reserved for men of his particular profes- sion, of whom there are comparatively few. How does education help men in other callings to create sound public opinion and thus contribute to the common good? It helps them often most when they are uncon- scious of pursuing such an object. Influences for good or, it may be, for evil in matters respecting civic conduct, and public legislation, and world- politics radiate out from every educated man, whether he will or no. He is known to have a source of power within him. He is listened to, on this account, if he speaks on public matters, and if he keeps silence, he will be asked to speak. I do not refer particularly to platform speech. Few have the gift of addressing a great audience m such a way as to make any real impression. But the educated man who possesses that gift is the keeper of a great treasure, which he has no moral right to leave unused. This has been the strength of parliamentary government in Great Britain. The House of Lords has always been mainly composed of educated people, — educated according to the standards of their generation. Men of similar training have 114 THE RELATIONS OF generally constituted a majority of the House of Commons and the whole of the ministry. Debate is a more important factor in legislation in Eng- land than with us. There, the executive authori- ties of the nation always control a majority of the governing body. They must keep this con- trol, or pass out of office. Consequently they must have among them those who can state their poli- cies clearly upon the floor, and defend them with vigor. With us, where the President of the United States is the master instead of the servant of his cabinet officers, and is practicably irremovable, and where Governors are expected to use their veto power, and none have yet been threatened with a recall, the power of the orator counts for less. It coimts for less, and the power of the pen for more. The educated American finds his largest oppor- tunities for leading public opinion in the ordinary intercoiurse of common life. Let him never forget, for one thing, when he talks politics with a neigh- bor, that ours is a system of representative govern- ment. That he knows to be the invention of the Anglo-Saxon race. He knows also that it was the Anglo-American race that gave it its present form, and has, therefore, a special obligation to preserve EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 115 it from degradation or corruption. Parliament grew slowly from a House of Lords into two houses, in one of which the people were represented. It was still largely under the control of its House of Lords when American government b^an. It was still making few laws, when the American colonies were making many. It is still making few, while the American States are making many. It is virtu- ally becoming one House, — the House of the People. It is thus turning England from a republic into a democracy. The King is the mere chairman of the committee of the whole. ^t has been found less easy to democratize re- publican government in the United States, Our written constitutions stood in the way. Our House of Sovereign States rose up like the central fortress within a medieval city — a castle of Edinburgh, a citadel of republicanism. The Americans of the eighteenth century planned something more durable than the English Constitu- tion of the seventeenth century, — the Constitution under which their ancestors had been bom, and which had proved inadequate to assure their liber- ties. It is one of the responsibilities of our edu- cated men to keep this fact before the people, and make it a matter of common pride that true 116 THE RELATIONS OF representative govemment is less our inheritance than our creation. It is not democratic government. We do not found it on the institutions of Greece or Rome or medieval Europe. We do not found it on English institutions. We have made it something new. Another American invention is the referendum, introduced here in 1660.^ It first appears in early New England, but imder careful guard. It was to apply only to great questions of public order, like the making or amendment of a social compact or constitution, or else to the disposition of proposi- tions for purely local measures by a purely local vote. In each of these classes of cases, those to whom the decision is left directly are presmnably con- versant with the main reasons for and against the adoption of the measure. But, when made to serve the purposes of ordinary legislation, the referendum may easily be misapplied. The pressure of recent years for such extensions of it, supplemented by the initiative and the recall, makes for what in principle is un-American. It looks towards an absolute democracy. The referendum invokes the direct action of the people, instead of that of their chosen representatives. It withholds when applied to 1 Colonial Records of Conn., I, 346, 347. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 117 matters of ordinary le^slation, from those holding ultimate political power all opportmiity of taking coimsel together and exchanging views in a face to face discussion. It destroys, or at least minimizes, the sense of personal responsibility for measures of government. Do the people generally understand all that these things imply? We know that they do not, and it is the business of the educated man, so far as he can, to guide them to such an understanding. It is his solemn duty to share with them the fruits of knowl- edge. The educated man must take an interest in politics. All men should, but of all, he most, because he can understand them best. He can best picture to himself and to his fellows the probable conse- quences of bad laws and bad selections for office. His imagination is, or ought to be, the watchman of the State. He can see farther than others. He can interpret appearances and forecast the future as they cannot. He has, therefore, an opportunity to do much in giving shape to sound public opin- ion, and it is one which it is his duty actively to improve, if a citizen of a coimtry where, as here, public opinion is a great political force. A Rus- sian might be pardoned for silence. There must be a public — a people — with political authority, 118 THE RELATIONS OF before there caa be a public opinion that has any real power.* The educated woman has here a place of special opportunity. Much of what has been previously said, in discussing the general subject under con- sideration, applies equally to her. But in the crea- tion of public opinion women have more power than men. They have the training of the next generation at the stage when it is most impressible. The principles which are then instilled soon seem innate. Women, also, in the main, create, and by their innate conservatism preserve, the customs of the civilized world. These are largely made by each generation for the next. In all organized society there are two forces, con- stantly acting against the individual: that of the whole social organization — the State, — and that of all the other individuals, whom* it embraces. The greater the compulsion exercised by them, the less is the compulsion which it can be necessary for the State to exercise. The body of law varies inversely as the body of custom. Even if those rules not pre- scribed by law are unwise, it would be more unwise for the State to imdertake to alter them before the ^ See Andrew D. White's criticism of Sedey's Life of Stein, Seven Great Statesmen, 301, no EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 119 mass of the people were ready to consent to such a change. Human progress is through changes m g^eral customs. What we have learned voluntarily to relinquish, or have become satisfied that it would be better to relinquish, we easily suffer the State to forbid. Public opinion thus precedes law and limits law. Never has this been shown and seen more clearly than in the twentieth century. It is a caricature of modem society to say that we are making it the age of the crowd and the demagogue. It is, indeed, not as reflective as the eighteenth or as most of the nineteenth. It is too busy in action; too successful in external results; too apt to take things as they come, without stopping to consider how we can personally respond to them. The crowded city is, however, on the whole, proving itself the seat of the best thought. The demagogue is suffered only because he is not exposed. He escapes because the proper guides of the people shirk their duty. A truer interpretation of this age for Americans is that of Professor Boyce, who foimd in it one ''in which our nation, rapidly transformed by the oc- cupation of new territory, by economic growth, by immigration and by education, has been attempt- 120 THE RELATIONS OF ing to find itself anew, to redefine its idealsi to retain its moral int^pity, and yet to become a world power/' Such times are the transcendent opportu- nity of every person of superior education, and corresponding character. In the development of social usages and conven- tions, the principle of natural selection ultimately governs. Those best adapted to the place and time survive. But the result of this test is seen too late to benefit those who were originally called on to give them their assent, or to refuse it. The educated man, with the aid of history and sociology, can often anticipate the event. By predicting it, and by his ability to show how it is to be predicted, he may thus, within the circle of his influence, render a great service to the men of his generation. He may, and he should. His power is the measure of his duty. His obligation is not lessened because the ma- jority in the community may be against him. The majority are always led by a minority. An aristoc- racy of leadership is everywhere inevitable. The place of every educated man is among the leaders, not the followers. Out of every four himdred children who receive the ordinary training of a public school, only one, on the average, the statisticians say, proceeds to EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 121 college and finishes his college course. He has betrayed the opportunity of his youth; if he has not gained something in knowledge and power, which the three hundred and ninety-nine have missed. He, of all others, must do his own thinking, because he has been best taught to think. Those who come under his influence may not always follow his reasoning, but this will not neces- sarily impede the acceptance of his conclusions. Many a teacher puts his thoughts so clearly and dis- tinctly in order, that his class think they under- stand his line of exposition, even if they do not. They have imbibed all that they were capable of assimilating, and probably do well to take the rest on faith. It will be so with the people as a whole. He who would lead them to new opinions must do his best to make plain to them what is plain to him, and then not be too impatient if he find himself misunderstood and misrepresented. He must be content to move slowly, and not con- tend for too much, to start with. So far as he can assent to the current doctrines of the day he should let his assent be known. He has, of course, no right to affirm what he believes to be imtrue, however widely it may be regarded in the community as incontestable. Sarpi may have been right when he 122 THE RELATIONS OF declared: La falsiid turn dico mai mat, ma la verifd rum a ognuno. We do not persuade men to follow us by telling them that they are fools, although such they be, and we know it. But we can attack a particular error m their political creed, leading to some present and pressmg mischief, without feeling bound to tell them that it is only one of many to which they are equally committed. The mass of the people will not abandon, as a whole, the general political beliefs current in their time. They will not listen to the voice that pro- nounces them all unsound. They may be con- vinced that some of them are unsound, by one who conlSnes himself to attacking those, and those only. Every man is strongly and incessantly drawn, by the influences of our day, towards the conmion standards of opinion and action. As he is drawn thitherwards, he is carried away from himself. For most men this is probably well. Each century in modem times has been better than its predeces- sors, and to stand as well as the average of men in your community in the twentieth century is, com- paratively considered, to have attained some meas- ure of success. But what is right for most men is wrong for the educated man* He must keep ahead EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 123 of those who have been entrusted with less. Con- formity with the mass of the conmimxity may do for them. He must labor to make the mass of the community conform to him. He will do this most effectually, who, so far as may be, speaks from an optimistic standpoint and encourages an optimistic spirit in those aroimd him; seeking to promote public confidence in the soimd- ness of our institutions, and no less to allay public distrust of honest efforts to improve them. The man who has really profited by a college education will not have f^ed to learn that, in actual life, extreme views are seldom pushed to their logical outcome. He will be apt to hold his own, if he has any, in reserve, and to have little dread of the practical results of those of others. As he looks ahead, he will see no lions in his way. One of his duties will be to protest against all exaggeration of national perils. Once in every four years an occasion for such exaggeration occurs. An expiring administration is to be judged by the people. • There will be platform orators who can see only evil in what it has accomplished, and others who, with equal sincerity or lack of sincerity, can see no evil in what it has accomplished. The party newspapers and the party speakers become oriental 124 THE RELATIONS OF in their 8*y^ of expression. They deal only in superlatives. That moderation which flows from education^ and runs a steady course, is here of the greatest use. The mass of the people are always distrustful of extremists. They need spokesmen to make this distrust known. The educated American may be, and ought to be, such a spokesman. He must always remember that, in addressing the general public, he is preaching to an audience with a keen instinct of right, but little power of drawing close distinctions, — with feelings easily moved, and, when quickly excited, not always easy to control within reasonable bounds. Lecky declares that emotion is taking a diminished place in modem life. If this be so, it is the duty of the educated man to do what he can to arrest the movement, were it only for its bearing on practical politics. Public sentiment is a purer source of action, or a source of purer action, than knowledge or even wisdom. It is God-made. Happy the man or woman who can guide it in right paths, be it in small things or in great. One of the special dangers of ova times is that great riches may come to be deemed a measure EDUCATION TO CITIZENSmP 125 of success in life. The millionaire is commoner in the United States than in any other quarter of the globe. It is easier to become one, here than else- where. The newspapers are full of their doings. How shall public opinion regard them? How can it be led to see that happiness lies in quite a different direction? No one can preach with so much effect as the educated man the good of living content with a moderate income. He knows, as no other can, how little the possession of the greatest enjoyments of life, moral, intellectual, or physical, depend on wealth. They are for every man who has health, industry, temperance, and thrift. The struggle to acciunulate a great fortune belongs to an age with no ideals beyond barbaric splendor, or one, like ours, where it is the excitement of the struggle that is its real reward. The man whose main capital is his education can insist on these things with effect, for he carries, or ought to carry, the proof in himself. For one thing, be he rich or poor, it has made him a citizen of the world. The educated American stands at the center of three circles of social duty. The State throws her circle about him. He owes her allegiance. He owes to her people, in most respects, his first duty. The 126 THE RELATIONS OF next circle, of the United States, is again a field of allegiance, and of broader, though remoter, opportunity for benefit and benefiting. Widest of all comes the circle of the world. Here allegiance, in its strictest sense, is absent; but the obligations of a common humanity are strengthening with every century, and never faster than now. There has come to be a certain feeling of brother- hood between nations, or at least the beginning of it. No insignificant event in world-history is the recent establishment at the Hague of a ''Foimdation for the Promotion of Internationalism.'' It is at present addressing itself only to the study of the subject with reference to a few particular sciences, but its scope is universal. Already it has taken an active share in establishing there, with the aid of the government of the Netherlands, three permanent bureaus of international co-operation; one that of the International Congress of Medicine; another that of the International Federation of Pharmacy; and the third that of the International Institute of Statistics. That a State exists for the good of its people is, under the clear light of our day, seen to be true only EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 127 when a broad view is taken of what is their good. Each citizen of that State is also a member of himian society. Nothing is for his good which brings evil to all other men, except those of his own coimtry. All these other men, as soon as they felt such an evil and knew its source, would unite to put an end to it; and they would succeed by force of numbers. The French Revolution brought in the watchword of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; but it was a watchword to signify the true relations of fellow citizens under the same government. Of late, it has been more and more clearly seen, as we set our faces towards the Future, that nations, in their relations with other nations, are coming to own the possibility of making some such cry the voice of the world. It is no longer the poets only who predict the time when "Nation with nation, land with land. Unarmed shall live, as comrades free." The spread of commerce, ocean telegraphy, the aeroplane, the multiplication of international con- ferences and bureaus of a private as well as of a public nature, the growing use in the Orient of Western languages and customs, the common basis 128 THE RELATIONS OF of university teachings due to the interchange of instructors between different countries, and the increasing number at all the great universities of students coming from foreign lands, all tend to unify the ideas and standards of the world, and so to remove the causes of war. It has always come largely from differences of national ideas and stand- ards. Cousin puts this strongly in his history of philosophy. In each epoch, he says, some one world power has dominated the rest, and it has done so because it represented the national idea most in accord with the general spirit of the epoch. When- ever it no longer represented it best, its leadership ceased; and it ceased also when this national idea gave place to another, which in turn best reflected the time-spirit, and which some other nation best interpreted and made its own. But it did not sur- render its hegemony without a struggle; and that struggle was war. This had much truth in it, when it was written. But, happily for us, history since the first half of the nineteenth century has taken on a new shape. The professed ideals of all civilized nations are — in the higher ranges of thought and action — al- most indentical. Italy thought it necessary on seizing Tripoli, to justify her action in a despatch EDUCATION TO CITIZENSfflP 129 from her foreign office to a New York newspaper. The world would not have been surprised a thousand years ago, or two hundred years ago, by such an act on the part of a Christian power against a Mahometan power. This is because of a change of view-point. World morals have improved. Edu- cation in civil and religious liberty has improved them, and improved them in the same directions. It is in the power of every educated man to do something to push on this movement towards world imity. He is a citizen of the republic of letters. As such, he can, for one thing, exert a powerful influence by joining, from time to time, in the un- official international conferences, so many of which are now held every year, to discuss matters of scientific, literary, reUgious, or economic concern.' The topics considered are only those in respect to which there is a possibility of agreement and a certainty of exchanging valuable information. An opportunity is offered by each for forming personal friendships with thinking men of many lands. Such gatherings of those interested in legal or political science lead also to the study of foreign ^ See article on The International Confpresses and Con- ferences of the last Century as Forces Working toward the Solidarity of the World, in the American Journal of Interna- tional Law for July, 19(97. 130 THE RELATIONS OF isystems of government and the foundations of dtusenship, with an open mind. Are we sure, for instanoei that some other nations may not have oomprdiended, better than we, the character of law? The AmericaUi with his inherited love for govern- ment by laws and not by men, finds it difficult to accept the general European view that the opinion of a great jurist on a doubtful point is of more weight than the judgment of the higheofi court; and that the authority of a statute does not really rest on the assent of the people, formally g^ven, by their proper representatives, so much as on its intrinsic reasonableness. The international conference, official or un- official, is the creation of the last hundred years. It is an institution which has steadily grown in significance, and to Americans particularly since the close of our Civil War. Buckle long ago remarked that better systems of internal communication bring in new ideas. Still more is this true of the better systems of inter- national communication, which are the product of the last half century. They open new fields of influence to the common labors of the educated men of all lands, who, as they take daily part in what we may term international life, are in the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 131 very thought of it led always higher. An inter- national life which has its correspondence with the whole world — the whole universe so far as we know it — must draw from the universal, the eternal, the divine, if it would frame rules of conduct that are adequate to its environment. The thoughtful discipline of years has taught the educated man that there is nothing local or geographical in truth, and that lines between nations mean little to one who has faith in what the nine- teenth century was the first to assert as the ruling principle of life — the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. Such an one occupies a position of detachment from his times. He belongs to them. He feels their influence. He is powerless to escape it. But he belongs to something greater. He is a citizen of that world which has been evolved in slow course of countless ages, and understands, as can no one else, how the present hangs upon the past. World-opinion is a composite of the opinions of many peoples. The highest point of human achievement is to lead it, provided it be led towards the Right. How best to do this, and what the task really means, the higher education ought to teach. Public opinion, national or international, has 132 THE RELATIONS OF its laws. It responds to enlightenment. It some- times deserves oensurei and when it does, no one can be so able to pronounce a judgment that, whether followed or not, will be respected, as the educated man. College prepares him for such a service. In its little world of social ambitions, of warm rivalries, of settled usages, of detachment from outside interests, the student, whatever else he may have received or failed to receive, has been trained under the domination of public opinion, and taught to respect it. He has been one of a society which acknowledged its rightful rule. It has been in some respects, probably, ill founded, narrow, antiquated. If so, let us hope that he has had the manliness to insist on its limitations. The student who has ventured to question a college tradition has imder- taken a task beside which that of combating, in maturer days, the traditions of a party or a people often seems light. Through what channels of approach can the public mind be best made to respond to the influences of the higher learning? Whether it be as to what concerns local, or national, or international affairs, the surest, though not the fastest means of in- fluencing public opinion is monopolized by the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 133 educated. It is that incident to the work of in- structing students at school and college. No true teacher will fail to seize that opportunity. There is another open to all^ but much less used, in quite the opposite direction. A class, almost neglected in this respect, but which it is of high importance to reach, in seeking to diffuse soimd political ideas, is that of the old men. They have most of the property. It is the stronghold of their position in life. It gives them power in their family, and power in the community. The weight of taxes on capital falls directly on them, and though they throw off most of it on others, they do so for the most part unconsciously. Their natural tendencies are all towards avoidance of new public expendi- tures and general adherence to old ways and old institutions. One of Joubert's most striking "Pensiea" is that "En HevarU un enfarU, U favt aonger d aa meiUesse" The professional educator may well re- member this, but others should also. There is no educated man who is not himself an educator, every- where and always. He too should not forget his duty to the old, and his opportunfty, by addressing them in the right way, to bring their great influence to bear on public questions in the direction where 134 THE RELATIONS OF he believes such mfluence is needed for the general good. They have the leisure to hear him. Bartsch, in one of his plays, pictures a little city in a sunny valley, where there are many old men who are enjoying thdr last days in a state of rest, ''und Zeit, Zeit haben." He makes them give their time to the life of illusion and ideals, offered by art. But it ought not to be too difficult, by the right arguments, to convince such an one that in honor and duty he is bound to give his strength, so far as it remains, to the true and the actual. When the struggle for bread is over, and bread assured, there are many, and there should be more, to whom the duty of altruistic life comes home, with the opportunity to adopt it. This duty of the educated man to appeal to the old grows stronger with every year of his active life, because each brings him nearer to the age of those whose ear he hopes to get. He becomes closest to them when he is, at last, one of them, and then is his opportunity for such service greatest. The old man who stands for old methods will always find a ready audience in his own class. He will be listened to and put forward by a larger class, if he stands for new methods. He ought not to lose his interest in public questions, because they cannot EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 135 concern him long. If education ha^ given him power, it is precisely because his years are few that he is bound to use it, as he may have opportunity, for the public benefit. A long life has certainly brought him variety of knowledge. Its fitting close is to use it for others' good. The old man who is ready and able to do this is only fulfilling a natural obliga- tion, and as he does it, he can say with Jowett that "the last ten years of life are the best, for they are the freest from care, the freest from illusions, and the fullest of experience." The duty of the imiversity graduate to do his part in shaping public opinion as to the conduct of public affairs is more important now than in former ages, because the influence of education on the dis- position of political questions is more personal, less corporate, than once. The conception of its worth and authority in such matters, which led to the representation of the two great English universities in Parliament, and of William and Mary College in the Virginia House of Burgesses, has given way to theories of a more purely popular representation. The authority to speak for a university is now limited to expressions concerning imiversity problems alone. Time was 136 THE RELATIONS OF when universities were not seldom officially consulted by governments as to the nature of rules affecting matters of State, and a response given which was ex cathedra, but the eighteenth century witnessed the abandonment of this practice forever.^ The university man in the United States owes it to his country to do whatever is in his power to cultivate a public opinion carrying popular trust in our judicial institutions. Here one distinction between our government and all others cannot be too often explained or too strongly insisted on. With us, our courts virtually, though indirectly, are part of and control our political machinery; though for the most part only in settling contro- versies between private individuals. Justice, in American government, means legal justide. It does not mean social justice, xmless it be also legal. Here our written Constitutions set the United States apart from all other nations. If Germany wishes to compel employers to compensate their workmen ^When, in championing the Catholic Disabilities Repeal Act| in 1791, William Pitt desired information as to whether a Roman Catholic's allegiance to the Pope came before his allegiance to his country, and sought it in leading uni- versities of Spain and France, it was by application to particular members of their faculties for their individual opinion. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 137 for any injury suffered in the course of the employ- ment, it finds no obstacle to its doing so by a new statute. But such legislation here must be judged by certain constitutional standards, and it is for the courts ultimately to apply the test. The edu- cated man must impress on the common people at large this fact, and that if they find it one in- convenient to reckon with, their efforts should be not so much to devise new statutes as to change their Constitutions. It has been found next to impossible to amend the Constitution of the United States, xmless in some time of profound national upheaval. With the State Constitutions it is, and it should be, other- wise. Each of them concerns a comparatively small body of people, living in close intercourse with each other, and having in the main common interests and traditions. The man of education should look to it that the people of his State appreciate the fact that, as to by far the greater part of the law that governs their mutual relations, it is always in their power to change it in a year or two, either by legislation or constitu- tional amendment. They can make and remajce their own government. The power of every official is what they choose to give him. If it be too great. 138 THE RELATIONS OF the fault is theirs. If it be too small, the fault also is theirs. Public opinion should be led to support the plac- ing of large authority in the executive department of government. Every year that passes shows more clearly how all-important this is, for the mainten- ance of social order. It is demanded, if by nothing else, by the increased and increasing intelligence of the people. Ages of popular education are likely to be ages of increased political activity. The State will be pressed to take more upon itself. It will thus antagonize those whom it displaces. The antagonisms may be sharp. If so, there will be a greater c^ for force to support the new social order. Force may sometimes be met by force; — the col- lective force of all by the collective force of a part. What public sentiment before regulated or repressed must now be overcome by sterner methods. They must be used with a wisdom and an effectiveness proportioned to the intelligence of those against whom they are directed. John C. Calhoun said that the time of trial for our country would come when all the people were fully educated. It had been proved to be possible to govern the ignorant, by means of a republic. It would be a new problem of free government, EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 139 when it came to deal with those who all knew as much as those who bore rule over them. There are those who claim that under such con- ditions Gresham's law is as valid in education as in finance. As Dr. Flexner has put it, in a recent publication of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teachmg, m a community over- stocked with physicians, the inferior medium tends to displace the superior. To me the reverse seems true. A people may, as a whole, be over-educated, but the best educated of them will be those to whom the most will turn for help in matters of real importance, and from whom public opinion is most likely to take its color. The best educated will often do the highest service in advocating halfway measures. They are seldom popular, but they are often the wisest. The ordinary man has a poor sense of proportion. He is too apt to be an extremist, without knowing it. He must be shown, among other things, how much is lost by gomg too far and doing overmuch in this line or in that. He must be made to feel also that party plat- forms have their limitations, and that every plank in them may not be equally sound and substantial. The natural tendency, under a S3rstem of representa- 140 THE RELATIONS OF tive govertuneut, is to put too much faith in political parties. Few thinking men can approve every measure to which their party may commit itself. But the place of the educated man, neverthele^, is, I believe, generally to be found in the party with which he finds himself most nearly in agreement. He gets a backing there which makes his influence, on the whole, count for far more. The last half century, in political matters, has steadily marched away from Individualism. Proba- bly the march has not been wholly for good. The feeling of individual responsibility has been weak- ened. Individual initiative has been repressed. Individual freedom has been limited at more and more points. A narrowing of the circle of indi- vidual rights in all directions is evident. Suffrage itself has been fettered and circimiscribed by the introduction of direct primaries and complicated ballots. But whether we think these movements well- judged or not, and whether the collectivism of party is or is not to be preferred to the individualism of the independent voter, it is hardly to be doubted that there is another field in which individualism is an obstacle to progress. It is the field of associated EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 141 effort by private citizens for promoting public ends unconnected with party questions. Much more can be accomplished, in influencing public opinion in a particular direction, by a society of individuals, acting collectively, than by all its members, acting each for himself. If the initiative be left to each, there will be no common plan to pursue, — no common points towards which to struggle. The great end in view may be settled and recognized by all. But as to the lines to choose, best leading up to it, there will be no harmony of design. We must recognize, then, a duty of the educated man to promote associated effort of this kind for good ends. Here as everywhere, however, he must act with moderation, and advise with care. We all know how many organized and officered associa- tions there are or have been, professedly aiming to stir public opinion and promote the public interests in one way and another, but, in fact, absolutely superfluous. What is their general history? Al- most always it is this. A few ardent and hopeful spirits promoted the original formation of the society. They prepared its constitution and by- laws, — usually far too lengthy. They got up the first meeting, keeping themselves in the background, 142 THE RELATIONS OF and putting forward some figure heads of greater distinction. A few years pass and the society has vanished, not because its ends were not good, but because its members threw what was their burden on its officers, and they in turn passed it over to hired agents, or perhaps because some other associa- tion was found to have been aheady doing the same work sufficiently well. Or if it survives, it has sunk into a receptacle for annual contributions, which get no farther than the pocket of a paid secre- tary, who magnifies his office but not its fruits. Many a society for the promotion of philanthropic causes and altruistic public sentiment, lives on what it gets from educated men who are too indolent to inquire how the annual dues are spent. Often, if they would take the trouble to investigate, they would find that it had long outlived its usefulness, and was engaged in the hopeless effort to manufac- ture public sentiment by proxy. Every such scheme of public service, as Emerson has said, naturally tends to become a job. The power of those of superior intellectual training to shape public opinion has not grown in proportion to the general advancement of himian knowledge. This general advancement has been so rapid and EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 143 extensive that few can hope to keep pace with it. The rest are content to concentrate and localize their studies. The man whom the twentieth century counts as a scholar is therefore, in some respects, less fitted to lead the opinion of the commimity than were educated men in previous ages. His education has covered less ground. If he be not what we term a specialist, he has some of the limitations of one. The spirit of our times, in university circles at least, looks on high scholarship in a particular field, as entitled to more respect than high attainments in general knowledge. But the world at large does not look for leaders in world government from great scholars in any particular science. It wants '' all- round" men, more. They can do it more good, because they know more of things in general, even if in any particular subject they may be comparatively deficient. Their sympathies are wider. The man with but one idea is never popular. Few care to hear him talk twice. Queen Victoria said of Lord John Russell, that he would be better company, if he had a third subject, but he was interested in nothing but the Constitution of 1688 and himself.^ The public man who is, at heart, devoted to ^ Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. See., XVIII, 147. 144 THE RELATIONS OF nothing but personal ambitions or gains is soon detected. The public are not interested in advanc- ing his fortunes or listening to his counsels. Education may help him for a time, but not for long, in influencing public opinion in direc- tions especially benefiting himself, or to advance the particular interests of some class in the com- munity to which he may belong, or which he desires to favor. To use his powers thus, for promoting the good of one man or one class at the cost of the rest of the people, whatever be the motive, is, of course, to violate his obligations to his country. Nor can what he may accomplish endure. A public opinion rooted in selfishness or class interest may, at times, be held by a majority of the voters, or of those of them who care to vote. But a small majority differs little from a large minority; nor is a large majority of all the voters, even where woman's suffrage prevails, ever a majority of the people. The children will outnumber their parents. The children are those upon whom the burden of class privilege or any other form of bad legislation will be apt to fall most heavily. It prepares the conditions under which they are to enter on active life. It determines, so far forth, whether they are to have, as between EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 145 themselves; an equal chance. Any wrong to them they will right in due season. Nor, although the public opinion, for the time bemg, of the voters run m an overwhehnmg current, will it endure, even for the life of the generation which holds it, if it be fundamentally unjust. Against such a current, the educated man must stand in his place, to the utmost of his power, sus- tained by the steady faith, which his education should assure, in the correcting influence of time. 146 THE RELATIONS OF VI THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP The terms of any foundation established in per- petuity for educational ends, must be interpreted, in every age, with some regard to the spirit of that age. What is the Christian citizenship, which the founder of this lecture course may thus be taken to have had in mind, in planning for an annual reiteration of the duties that are attached to it? The twentieth century has accepted, without reservation, some points of philosophy which were treated as doubtful in the nineteenth. The doctrine of evolution has thus come to occupy an assured place in the thought of the world, and time once given to attacking or defending it is now devoted to studying its incidents and corollaries. We can see that Christianity is a work of evolution, and has meant very different things in different centuries. It is viewed as less distinctive in form than it was once thought to be. Greater emphasis is placed on its influence on the affairs of earth, as compared with what may be its influence on himian destiny in a future state of existence. Less store is set EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 147 on its theological fonnulas and more on its ethical and moral inspirations. A closer study of com- parative religion has shown that more of these elevating forces than was once supposed are common to other faiths; and we no longer shut our eyes to the truth that men professing no religion are often^ so far as man can judge^ among the leaders in what- ever makes for civic good. Christian citizenship is a comprehensive term. Those who most fully take upon themselves its duties are by no means the same as those who believe that Christianity is the best form of religious faith. The substance beneath that form has never been more clearly explained than by Jesus Christ himself, as he closed the Sermon on the Mount: "Not every one that saith unto me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my father, which is in heaven." Many a one before the birth of Christ, and many a one since, to whom Christian doctrine in forms of creed and metaphysics has been unknown and, if known, would have been repulsive, has done the will of his Father in Heaven, as he understood it, and found, in doing it, the key to the kingdom of heaven. However we regard such a man's attitude towards Christianity, there is something larger than 148 THE RELATIONS OF Christiaiuty. The Christian religion is one of many forms of what we call religion. We may consider it the greatest; but religion is larger than any of its i>arts. The world also is larger than religion, and larger than the church, whether that be viewed as one, or as an aggr^ation of many churches. In our land, with its composite people, and its perfect toleration of all religions, the influence of the educated man should be steadily exerted to promote respect for all of them, — for all, at least, that deserve the name. There has never been a country, of any degree of civilization, in which religion has not been a strong safeguard of government. Its general effect has been to teach obedience to authority; to repress selfishness; to be a terror to evil doers. It has al- ways helped to content men with life. It has held before them the thought of a life after death, and of an invisible power that ruled their destinies, whether in this world or the next. Loss of religious belief, on the part of any people, brings with it loss of morality, and dulls the sense of civic duty. Carlyle struck to the heart of the matter when he said that a man was living in a state of rebellion, if he rendered no worship, and had no reverence for anybody. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 149 The respect of an educated man for religion will be quite distinct from what may be his view of any particular form of religious profession. He may be a strong Methodist or a strong Roman Catholic; but he will feel that his own church, whatever it be, gives at best but an inadequate expression of what Man owes to God, of what God has done for Man. He may affiliate himself with no church. He may be an agnostic, or an atheist, but he will none the less feel and inculcate respect for what so many others revere. He will recognize the importance of religious institutions as the greatest single poUce force of civil government, — with us an unpaid force, so far as pubUc moneys are concerned. If he be a believer in Christianity, he will do his part, as he has opportunity, to set forth its real nature and spirit. Unless these underUe the general re- ligious thought of Christian people, there will be easy entrance for atheism, and atheism logically leads to anarchy. Cardinal Newman said that two distinct types of mind were shown in the Catholic and the Puritan. To the Catholic the visible and the invisible were only two different aspects of one great reality. To the Puritan they stood apart, as sundered, if not antagonistic. 150 TBDB RELATIONS OF What this great thinker and greater writer thus described as the Catholic view, is in fact becoming in this century the universal type of the philosophy of religion. It is not so much by the multiplication of believers in the Roman CathoUc church, as by the passing of Protestant theology from the control of Puritan ideas. The oneness of life, here and here- after, is the prevailing, if half unuttered, faith of the whole of American Christendom. President Butler of Columbia Univendty has sidd that a complete education must include science, art, literature, institutional life, and religious beUefs. Of these, all but science and art involve a study of religions, and make a pulpit of every student's desk. They may convince him that no religion is absolutely perfect. They may convince him that he, personally, has no need to ally himself to any of them. The educated man often feels himself able to stand upright alone, unaided by religion. He sees so many problems on every side calling for considera- tion and susceptible of at least approximate solu- tion, that there seems no room and no time for concerning himself with what belongs to the super- natural or the infinite. But there are few such as he. He must live, be it only for life as he now under- EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 151 stands it, in such a way as to do no injury to the majority of the community. He does such an injury, if he actively deny the existence of a personal God, and a future life. For them, if not for him, a belief in those things is necessary to keep the mdividual in proper relations to the State. As Napoleon said, if there were no religion, those charged with the administration of government would everywhere have to invent one. Comparative religion is a subjective study. It centers about man. The world is becoming Chris- tianized, not so much by the slow advances, here and there, of what we term missionary effort, put forth by professed religionists, as by the general advance everywhere of the human towards the humane. The teachings of Christianity quicken the growth of civilization, and set in order the forces on which all good government rests. Their influence in these directions is felt by men of all religions, and more and more is taking possession of the leaders of thought in every nation. We may almost say, as we view the work of the last twenty years in deepening the foundations of international concord, that the world has been Christianized, and has already begun to come under the dominion of the ''Prince of Peace." 152 THE RELATIONS OF It is hard to bring home to ourselves the eictent to which, within that period, the moral forces of the world have been quickened and expanded. It has made possible much that previously would have been justly r^^arded by most men as impossible. The universal power of public opinion has con- secrated humanity. All governments have been assimilated. All governments have been associated in the endeavor to re-mould the laws of nations, private and public. To the last of the six great Conferences that have been held at the Hague for the advancement of international law, public or private, all civilized nations were parties, and its main endeavor was to set bounds to war. The men whose education enables them to watch this great world-movement most intdligently owe it to their fellows to explain how it can best be pro- moted and made most useful to all. They see, and they can make others see how great is the reason for hope that the reign of War has nearly passed, in that the civilized world has at last attained a common stand-point, first, in regard to the nature of civil government, and, second, in regard to the ethics of political administration. Once before in the history of the world there was such a common stand-point. It was when Chris- EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 153 tianity reached the throne of the Roman empire. To the educated man of that day, — necessarily a subject of the empire, and probably adhering to the Christian church, — the community of mankind was a familiar conception. The Holy Roman empire prolonged the prevalence of the philosophical doctrine of human brotherhood, but denied it m the practice of government. Wars of religion came to belie it. Europe fell apart under the Protestant Reformation. Humanity became a thing of literature rather than of life. Kant never showed himself more truly a seer than when he said that the world, before it could become one, must become republican in its form of govern- ment. That time, in substance, has now arrived. It makes little difference, in effect, what a country calls itself, or calls its rulers. England, with a king and emperor, is, at home, more of a democracy than France. It is more of a democracy than the United States, with our series of successive electorates for President and Senators, with our absolutism in the executive department, and with our transcendent and uncontrollable authority in the judicial depart- ment. But in England, in France, in the United States, in every civilized country, the twentieth century sees the good of the people acknowledged 154 THE RELATIONS OF to be the end of govenuneat and the will of the people its supreme law. The State, we everywhere agree with Hegel, arose out of society to guarantee to each individual, and to each alike, that he shall remain master of his individuality against the self- seeking efforts of any competitor. Nowhere has this poUtical conception been ex- pressed in terms of law so fully as in the United States. It is rational and it is religious to maintain that the best form of civil government, whatever it may be or come to be, should be ultimately adopted by every country fitted to receive it. American citizens have thus, if their scheme of government is what most of them believe it to be, a special re- sponsibility and opportunity to labor for the general acceptance, throughout the world, of its essential principles. Dr. Franklin was the first to suggest that the United States of America might lead the way for the United States of Europe. In a letter from him, written to a European correspondent, in October, 1787, he speaks thus of the new scheme of govern- ment, worked out by the Convention of that year at Philadelphia, and then before the country for ratification: "If it succeeds, I do not see why you might not in Europe carry the Project of good EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 155 Henry the 4th into Execution, by forming a Federal Union and One Grand RepubUck of all its different States & Kingdoms; by means of a like Convention; for we had many Interests to reconcile." ^ A conference of publicists was held at Rome, in 1909, styling itself the first Congress of European Federation. Two resolutions were adopted, which breathe the true civic spirit oi our century. One affirmed the desirability of a federation of the States of Europe which, without any attack on the autonomy or limitation of the sovereign rights of each nation, should have for its object to multiply international conventions, in order to regulate the economic and social relations of the different States by a uniform legislation: the other proposed the institution of a Supreme International Court, with cognizance of appeals involving the legal interpre- tation of international conventions which establish rules of private international law.^ A similar court, to hear appeals in cases of vessels seized as prize of war, is likely soon to become an established institution, under the provisions of the Hague Convention of 1907. ^ Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention, ni, 131. ^ I'' Congrds de la F^^ration Euiopfome: Compte- Rendu Sommaire, Rome, 1909, p. 36. ; 166 THE RELATIONS OF The progress made and promised in these direc- tions can only be understood by men of education, or those to whom they tell of it. It appeals with especial force to Americans. It makes for the ad- vance of Christian citizenship. It finds, in the Christian spirit, its most powerful support. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared last year, that ''life is a roar of bargain and battle, but in the very heart of it there rises a mystic spiritual note that gives meaning to the whole." There is something of the mystic to everything that is spiritual. The two belong together. The world often seems to move by faith, faster than by reason. The educated man is most powerful, as a leader of public opinion, when he can appeal to each, in its place. He knows better than others that nothing is permanently gained unless the reason is convinced. He knows that if we must choose be- tween faith and reason, then as to all that human reason can apprehend with full assurance, we should be untrue to the God within us, did we not make that reason the final test. As Luther said, ''Was der Vemunft erdgegen ist, ist^s gewiss doss ea Oott viel mehr entgegen ist.'^ Benjamin Kidd, towards the close of the last century, in what is still the most noteworthy attempt EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 157 to reconstruct Christian philosophy on the basis of biological evolution, affirmed that a rational religion was a scientific impossibility.^ Reason, he said, dictated a selfish struggle for existence, on the part of the individual or of any particular body of individu- als. To conduct otherwise was scientifically un- reasonable. Yet men did often conduct otherwise. They voluntarily subordinated their interests to those of some social organism, of which they were a part. They did so from a sense of duty. The justification of such conduct was ultra-rational, and a sufficient sanction was to be found only in religion. I shall not stop to ask whether pure ethics might not- also claim to offer such a sanction. Religion certainly does, and in no religion are the ethical and the altruistic so closely blended as in Christianity. But Christianity is stated in very different terms by different people. It may be so described as to offend human reason: it may be so described as to satisfy human reason. The educated American who would promote the advance of Society by promoting altruism, and so seeks to ally himself with the forces of religion, has not gone very far when he has proclaimed that Christianity deems every sin a form of selfishness. 1 Social Evolution, 109. 158 TBDB RELATIONS OF He must uphold the authority of Christianity to mMntftm this doctrine; and here he must be able to appeal to reascna. He is urging Society to act from altruismi not because this can be proved to be philosophically reasonable, but because religion commands it. This religion then — in the prevail- ing form in which it appears in this country — he has the burden of showing to be reasonably consistent with itself, if its tenets be properly stated. In other words, he can deduce no effective arguments, to carry conviction to thoughtful minds, from the teachings of Christianity, unless those teachings are scientifically examined, and — as he represents them to be — are scientifically vindicated. If this is not done, nothing is done that will be lasting, towards the improvement of society. David Ritchie pierced to the kernel of the truth when he said that "under the conditions of modem life in civilized countries, in proportion as religions re- main uninfluenced by rationalism, they become sources of national weakness and not of strength." ^ It is to be remembered, also, that what is done primarily for one's own country, may have more lasting effects in some other country, to which the torch of truth has been handed on. A whole people 1 Studies In Political and Social Ethics, 22. EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 169 may perish, but under modem conditions of inter- national intercourse, their discoveries and philoso- phies never can. Germany, during the last century, rescued the bible from the hands of mistaken friends, who were interpreting it under a theory of verbal inspira- tion. The German scholars who did this were work- ing, not for Germans only, but for the world. They set currents of thought in motion here, which have re-made the bible for Americans. It has given it new support on the side of reason; new Ught on the side of history. We feel, as a people, that the educated man best appreciates the bible, and the relative importance of its different parts. So far, then, as those less educated are able to understand his view, they have the right to expect him to use every fair opportunity to explain to them what is so clear to him, that all may comprehend the difference in weight between a ceremonial rule of the Mosaic law, and a precept of moral conduct uttered by Jesus Christ. In 1911 Paul Neumann, a private in the German army, was condenmed to imprisonment for life. Compelled by law to engage in military service, he had served four years but, being a Seventh Day Adventist, he believed that the seventh day was to 160 THE RELATIONS OF be kept sacred, as a day of rest. Refusing, from the first, to do any military duty on Saturday, he had been repeatedly sent to the guard-house for this insubordination, and had, in fact, spent most of his time there. He is described as a strong and intelligent man particularly well read in the bible. But how must he have read it? The Decalogue to him was the voice of God speaking to him, to-day. For him German scholarship had done nothing. His religion was bottomed on a misconception. One wonders if there were not those in whom he had confidence, who could have helped him to a better understanding of the truth, and if such a life could not even now be saved to the State by a wise word from some one who feels, in their full measure, the responsibilities of Christian citizenship. Those responsibilities are heavier, no doubt, in regard to morals than to doctrine. They have almost nothing to do with systematic theology, in countries where there is not an established religion. The atheist, even, who acknowledges the brother- hood of man, may be simply differing from the rest of us on a question of names. But there are few educated men who do not believe in the existence of a God. If others can, they can- not fail to be impressed with the famous argiunent EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 161 of Kant: ''Ztm Dinge erfHUen das GemUt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je dfter und anhdUender sick das Nachdenken damU besch&ftigt: der bestimte Himmd iiber mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir; — denn sie beweisen mir, dass ein OoU Ober mir und ein GoU in mir ist" Nor are there many educated men who do not feel that, so far as they can judge, such conduct as the highest civilization pronounces to be virtuous, wise, and just, best accords with the order of the universe, which is but another name for the divine wiU. This is far from saying that that order harmonizes with the ethics of our time, or that these ethics harmonize with the reason of our time, or with what seem the ruling principles of human nature. It does imply a duty of every citizen, in all times, according to the measure of his ability, to work towards making the laws and institutions of the land, and the whole life of political society, conform to those higher rules of action which, to those of his contemporaries who have the highest knowledge and clearest vision, seem to -belong to the realm of the eternal. The citizen of a republic is engaged in a scientific scheme. So far as he acts in a political capacity. 162 TBDB RELATIONS OF he must act, so far as he can see the truth, under the rules of the science of politics. It is a noble science; ^'nobler, even/' James Russell Lowell once said, ''than astronomy, for it deals with mutual repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God's purposes toward mankind." It is a science. which it is not at our option to study. We must study it, so far as we have the time and power, or we are untrue to the public trust which citizenship in a free government involves. That government we have an opportunity, and there- fore an obligation, to endeavor to improve. If the laws are not what they should be, every man by whose representatives they are made or continued, is bound to labor for their repeal. He is not to be content to take the past at its own valuation. Still less can he take the attitude that it makes little difference to a people in what manner they are gov- erned, and that, as it is the easiest way, so it is the best way to let things go as they are. Soon after the beginning of the last half of the nineteenth century, some one, in speaking of the editorial staff of the London Saturday Review, said that ''whereas with the generation of the Reform EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 163 Bill everything had been new, everything had been true, and everything had been of the highest im- portance, with them nothing was new, nothing was true, and nothing was of any importance.'^ If the charge was just, it was a serious fall from the one level to the other, but the English nation certainly did not share in it. There is always a place for the reformer. There is always a reward for well-motived and well- directed political activity. The idealists always win in the end. The true, the good, and the beautiful in human society are always ahead of us and the best citizens are those who, as they have pressed towards them, have felt most strongly, to use the words of Rousseau, that *'le ban n' 6taU que U beau mis en action.*^ ^ To follow the true, one must know what it is. The good citizen must be satisfied of that, first of all. The uneducated man must often content himself with accepting what others, whom he meets in daily life, may say in regard to it. The educated man can go to the highest sources, and read with full understanding. For him as a citizen the only rule is that of St. Paul: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.'' But so far as he finds himself com- 1 La Nouvelle Hdlolse, Part II, Letter XIL 164 THE RELATIONS OF pelled to accept what others prove, he owes it to himself to follow the highest teachings and the highest teachers of truth. In the Parisian cemetery of Pire le Chaise, a tombnstone bears this inscription: *^Ici repose Avgtute Charles CclOiqnonj mart plein de confiance dans la bonii de DieUj d Vdge de 68 ans et 4 mois, le 16 Amlf 18S0. II aima et chercha d faire du bien, et mena une vie douce et heureuse en suivard, avtant gu'il peiUf la morale et les legons des essais de Morir taigne et des Fables de la Fontaine" Many a man, whose friends do not thus advertise it, has taken his philosophy from moralists of similar types, when he could have found something better in the words of one of whom it was said: ''Never man spake like this man." Many an American has done this, because the influences of his early education left him a stranger to the teachings of the New Testa- ment. Religious freedom, that is, freedom of re- Ugion, brought him, under our notion of the duty of the State, freedom from religion. The independent and individual study of morals by the American citizen is thus especially necessary, because the nature of our institutions makes the public schools mainly silent in regard to it. Mr. Bryce has said in his American Commonwealth, EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 165 that of all the differences between the United States and the rest of the world none is so marked as that pertaining to the absence of religious tests or a religious establishment. Unlike the European, we have nowhere, for at least a century, looked at the State as ''an ideal moral power charged with the duty of forming the characters and guiding the lives" of its people. Since we do not, its citizens must share this fimction between them, in each generation, for the benefit of the next. What the State does elsewhere, the home and the chiu'ch must here assume upon themselves, aided always by the good and true in the entire conmiunity, according to the measure of their opportunities. It is indispensable, under every form of govern- ment, that the character of the people should be built up by the aid of the wisest and best. Their political aims must be kept high. It must be made an axiom of civics that no law should ever be enacted, no line of social conduct tolerated, which sinks below the moral standards of the time. A political revolution seldom accomplishes any good to a people unless it be accompanied by a moral revolution. Only a moral cause, indeed, — if we take "moral" in its broad and truest sense, — can justify a political revolution, and if any success 166 THE RELATIONS OF which is attained is to be permanent, it must be identified with moral advancement. The standards of right for an individual and for the State may not always be identical, at least in form. As has been already observed, in another connection, Christian citizenship is not inconsistent with national selfishness, for government is ad- ministered by trustees for the people. We can give away and give up what belongs to ourselves; not what we hold for others. The authorities of a na- tion which has some positive advantage over other nations, or some positive interest that is opposed to their interests, may do right when, in behalf of those for whom they act, they cherish and keep what it has got. But Christian citizenship is always inconsistent with personal selfishness. We are bound in honor and faith, as regards our political action, to use our power to affect the public at large, for the good of the public at large. For the same reasons we must steadfastly oppose others who may use theirs for their own peculiar and undue benefit. The tempta- tion to better one's position, by the aid of legisla- tion, at the expense of others, is a strong one. To do this is, of course, to use the power of the whole community to injure a part of it for the benefit of EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 167 another part. The most effectual means of resis- tance are, first, the influence of religion, supported by the churches, and, second, popular enlighten- ment, aided forwards by the use of press and plat- form. If the people can be made to see the essential unfairness of such legislation, it will not be enacted, or, if enacted, will be soon repealed, — repealed at latest by the next generation. The disposition of large commercial questions has often turned on considerations of this character. The Com Laws were in no small part carried through parliament by the voice of the English pulpits. In any such times of political discussions, the man of broad education is in a position of great advantage and corresponding obligation. In studying any question of economic policy, he can see both how it affects an individual producer or the individual consumer, and how it bears on the general welfare of society, of which the consumers may constitute but a small part, and the producers a part numeri- cally inconsiderable. If, in casting a vote or ad- ministering an office, he acts under a sense of the responsibilities of Christian citizenship, he will not forget that the welfare of society, as a whole, is the only justifiable object and, we may say, the only professed object, to be served by any policy of 168 THE RELATIONS OF trade. If it be one that favors individual freedom, it favors it, ostensibly, at least, because society is to profit by individualism. If it be one that favors collectivism, and so State Socialism, it is with the claim that Socialism, to that extent, is the natural and proper outcome of society. Citizenship rests on justice. Its powers and priv- ileges are given because it is just to give them. They must, therefore, be exercised in a spirit of justice. Christianity is a religion of sympathy, but it can make no compromise with evil. He who would keep his citizenship Christian may give due force to sentiment, but none to sentimentalism. This is particularly dangerous in its bearing on criminal justice. A crime is an offence against the State, that is, against the whole people. It may involve no violation of moral law. It may be committed unintentionally. It may be bitterly regretted the next moment. It may be followed by the strongest and purest resolutions that such an act shall never be done again. Nevertheless, in the ordinary course of justice it requires punishment by society, and for the sake of society. The magistrate ''beareth not the sword in vain." Against this theory of the duty of the State a EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 169 protest has oome during the last three quarters of a century from a large school of penologists. They assert that the main end of punishing the criminal is to reform him. Some go farther and assert that it is the only end. In the Constitution of Indiana (adopted in 1851), it is provided that ''the penal code shall be founded on the principles of reforma- tion, and not of vindictive justice." If by "vindic- tive justice" is meant a justice which is vindicated by the imposition of pimishment, this provision seems to me quite opposed to the teachings of the New Testament, and equally opposed to common sense. The individual who is wronged may be en- joined to forgive. But to the State, which represents not only him but the offender, and not only both of these but the rest of its people, the paramount object must be to do what justice demands. The crime must be regarded, as weU as the crimmal. No life and no property would be secure, in a country where the theory of the Indiana constitution was practically carried out. There are, however, social penalties for wrong- doing that governments may properly consider, in determining the character of legal punishnlents. The freer a country is, in respect to the degree of restraint exercised by the public over the conduct 170 THE RELATIONS OF of the individual, the more room is left for society to hiiid him by its rules and oonventions. It is the ofBoe of social institutions to be the complement of political institutions. They are the same on^ in the theories of Flato. The responsibilities of Christian dtijsensliq) extend alike to each, and its influence must be thrown with an equal hand against whatever may be bad in each. But it is an easier task to amend the laws than to amend society. Nothing is so obstinate as ancient custom. The spirit of Christian citizenship is a spirit of patience. It hopes for more than it expects. He who possesses it must be prepared to talk to dull ears. He will make whole-hearted advances to those whom he believes can profit by his help and find them but half-heartedly received. He will be content to wait and look to the Future to see to it that the work of one generation is completed by the next. Schiller said that, in the warmth of youth, he stretched out his arms to save the world, and found he had clasped a lump of ice. The young man who cherishes high aims is almost sure to underrate the wisdom of the community, and overestimate his own. He will be apt to mistake education for the EDUCATION TO CITIZENSHIP 171 power of education. He will discover in time that, if the world gave him a chill reception, the fault was in part his. The Christian citizen of the twentieth century will be among the first to own that wherever modem civilization extends, we are generally judged ac- cording to our deserts, and ''this wise world is mainly right." INDEX Agnostics, 44, 149 Altruism, 45, 47, 74, 134, 142, 167 America, political institutions of, 40 American form of government, 92, 114; political expansion, 119 Americans, a composite race, 18; duty as citisens, 78 Anarchy, 149 ^bitration, international, 99 Aristocracy, of leadership, 120 Aristotle, 46 Arnold, Thomas, 27 Artist, faculty of, 73 Associations, charitable, 140 Atheists, 44, 149, 160 Athletics, 4 Authority, respect for, 36, 45; personification of, 89, 92 Bacon, Lord, 49, 85 Bartsch, 134 Belgium, voting in, 55, 57 Bible, interpretation of, 159 Bismarck, 24 Brotherhood of Man, 126, 152 Bryce, James, 38, 95, 164 Buckle, 130 Burke, 25 Bume-Jones, Sir Edward, 22 Busy men, in office, 104 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 150 Calhoun, John C, 138 Carlyle, 77, 148 Carnegie Foundation, 44 . Children, teaching civics to» 35-41; burdening, 144 Christian citizenship, 146, 168 Christianity, rule of, 22; an evolution, 146, 156; relation to other religions, 146-151; is what, 157 Church, national, 92 Cicero, description of law, 98 Cities, as intellectual centers, 119 Citizenship of the world, 23, 29, 125, 131; education for, 27; Christian, 146, 168-171 Civics, instruction in, 35-41, 49, 118 Class interests, 72, 100, 144 CoUectivism, 140, 168 College, gives but partial edu- cation, 5, 108; daily change of horizon, 8; elective sys- tem, 29; agricultural, 54; its education not paid for, 75; attended by few, 120; influence on pubUc opinion, 132 College, Yale, 5 Collignon, A. C, 164 Colonies, 64 Commons, House of, 114 Congresses, international, 129, 98, 152, 155 Connecticut, 43 Conscience, 89, 91 Constitution, of U. S., 64, 137; of States, 137; over- 174 INDEX rules statutes, '101, 137; an entirety. 102; altering, 102, 103, 137; unwritten, 102 Conventions, social, 12 Com Laws, 167 Corporations, business, 60 Courts, supporting, 80-82, 136; absolutism of, 101; of na- tions, 156 Cousin, on national predomi- nances, 120 Criminal justice, 168 Curtis, George William, 86 Customs, 118, 119, 170 Decentralisation, 92 Declamation, 52 Demagogues, 119 Dodge, lecture foundation, 1 Dogs, 100 Educated men, who are, 10; the scholar in politics, 19; fill high offices, 24; are cap- italists, 24; as voters, 55; party relations, 65-69; as political leaders, 70, 71, 83; debt to society, 71; as private citiiens, 73-75; debt to the State, 77; attractions of office for, 106; as creators of public opinion, 112; as editors, 112; women, 118; duty to be leaders, 122; republic of letters, 129; alwasns educators, 133; over- educated, 139; relations to religion, 148 Education, spread of liberal, 2; importance of, 3; athletic, 4; begets tolerance, 7; a slow process, 8; gives broader views, 8; creates duties, 10; self-taught, 13, 50; of immigrants, 17-19; for citi- ■enship, 27; specialisation in, 30; on public and social questions, 33; in dead lan- guages, 32; in fixed cer- tainties, 34; military, 36; in civics, 35-41, 49; reli- gious, 44; soul of, 46; in public speaking, 51, 52; should be kept in the hands of the States, 53; of public opinion, 68; gives power of penetration, 104, 105; power to move slowly, 121; ages of popular, 138; includes what, 150; absence of reli- gious, 164; power of, 170 Elections, corruption in, 68 Electorates, 56 Emerson, 5, 11, 74, 75, 142 Emotion, as a political force, 124 England, a democracy, 115, 153 Enthusiasm, 59, 60 Equality, 11 Ethics, 44, 46; a new, 96; world ethics, 97 Europe, federation of, 155 Evolution, 146 Exaggeration, 123 Executive department, 138 Expansion, national, 96, 97 Extremists, 123, 124, 139 Flexner, Dr., 139 Franklin, 12, 64, 154 Freedom, d^Sned, 68 French Revolution, 93, 127 Germany, universities in, 2; scholars of, 159 God, belief in, 89; fatherhood of, 131; atheism, 151; within us, 156, 161 Goethe, on education, 3, 8; mDEX 175 on evolution, 9; on Nature, 14 Goyemment, modem, 47; may prefer itself, 78; acts as a trustee, 80, 166; American, 92; representative, 114 Governors of States, 85, 114 Gresham*s law, 139 Hadley, President, 65 Hague, Conferences at, 98, 152, 155; foundation to pro- mote internationalism, 126 Hamilton, opinion of office- holding, 106 Happiness, defined, 106 Hegel, 154 History, nature of, 77 Holmes, O. W., Mr. Justioe, 156 Holy Roman empire, 153 Home rule, 38, 53, 61 Human society, 81, 127 Humanity, 153 Idealists, 163 Ideals, 74, 163 Ideas of 1789, 47 Imagination, necessary for a statesman, 103; use in poli- tics to aU, 117 Immigrant, attitude towards law, 16; educating, 17-19 Immigration, 16 Imperialism, 63 Independents in politics, 140 Indiana, criminal justice in, 169 Individualism, 140, 154 Initiative, the, 116; individ- ual, 140 International Congresses, 129; at the Hague, 98, 152 International law, advance- ment of, 98, 152 Internationalism, 126, 131, 152 Intemosda, code of, 98 Intuitions, 88 Italy, 128 Jebb, Sir Richard, 46 Joubert, 59, 133 Jowett, 135 Judges, State, 101; functions as to statutes, 101-103 Judgment, native, 11, 12 Judicial system, American, 80- 82; absolutism of judges, 101; supporting, 136 Jurists, as authors of law, 130 Justice, defined, 136; vindic- tive, 169 Juvenal, 6 Kant, 153, 161 Kidd, Benjamin, 156 Laisses faire doctrine, 162 Language, foreign, acquaint- ance with, 22 Law, reform in, 58, 59; as measured by popular de- mand, 70, 91; relations to custom, 118; worid-law, 91, 97; Cicero's description of, 98; foreign conception of, 130 Lecky, 11, 124 Legislator, unconstitutional law, 102, 104 libel, law of, 20 Life, is what, 81, 91, 156; the future, 150 Literary power, 20 Localism, 86 London Saturday Review, 162 Lowell, James Russell, 162 Loyalty, 63, 89 Luther, on reason in religion, 156 176 INDEX BlajontiM. 120 Blan, a political animal. 76; the fotgotten, 92; general ad- -vanoe d, 122; farotheriiood of, 127. 131, 152; duty to God, 149 Martineaa, James, 31 MaaBaehiuetts, 43 Mi]itariam,93 Militaxy education, 36 Mill, John Stuart, 45 Millionaires, 125 Bdinorities, 120 Moderation, 123, 139 Moral forces, 41, 88; revolu- tionary, 165 Morality, relation to religion, 44; popular, 88; of the world, 129; where best studied, 164 Muckraking, 99, 100 Mysticism, 156 Napoleon, 93, 151 Nationalism, 63 Naturalisation, 40 Neumann, Paul, 159 Newman, Cardinal, 149 News, Yale, 5 Newspapera, 112 Nietasche, 77 Nominations, political, 108 OfBce, public: education as fitting for, 50; duties of, 84, 111; dignity of, 94 respect for those in, 92 attractions of, 106, 107 how gained, 108 Old men, influencing in poli- tics, 13a-135 Optimism, 123 Oratoiy, 51, 52 Origen, 8 Pariiament, British, 113, 135 Fkrty, pcrfitieal. 5a, 65, 139; Republican, 66; Federalist, 66; Democratic 66; edu- cated men in, 66, 67, 84; KngUsh partieB, 66; antago- nisms of, 107; platforms, 139 Penologists, 6, 169 People, the, political good sense of, 87, 124; moral convictions of» 90; coming in touch with, 108; opinions change slowly, 122, 124; all modem government of and for them, 153 Perils, national, 123 Person, political, 81 Phi Beta Kappa, 5 Philippines, 64 PiU, William, 136 Platform, speech, 51, 109, 112; party, 67 PUto, 170 Political economy, 167 Political science, broadening of, 96, 97; nobility of, 161 Politics, theorists in, 13; edu- cated men in, 15, 57, 76, 110; new, 96; science of, 162 Post office, 78 Pragmatism, 91 President of the U. S., 63, 64, 83, 85; ambitions of, 111; absolutism of, 114 Primaries, 140 Progressive poUtios, 14, 58, 119 Ptotestant Eefozmation, 93, 153 Psychology, 6 Public offioen, 84; rules of conduct for, 99, 111; offer of nomination, 106; broad- ening opportunity, 107; edu- cation of, by office, 109-111 Public sentiment, creating, 69, INDEX 177 121; interpreting, 70; basis of law, 02, 119; God-made, 124; influences of education, 142, 146; conditions of, 117, 131, 144 Public speaking, 51, 52 Puritan, 149 Reason, as a test of theology, 156-158 Recall, the, 116 Referendum, invented in Con- necticut, 116; uses of, 116 Reform, 59 Reform Bill, 162 Reformation, the, 93, 153 Reformers, 58, 91, 163 Religion, 44; coupled with Right, 90; as a governmental force, 90, 92, 148; com- parative, 146-151; respect for, 148; philosophy of, 150; reason in, 156; American freedom of, 164 Representative government, an Anglo-American device, 114 Republican governments, 153 Respect, for authority, 36, 45, 92 Reverence for superiors, 92 Revolution, cause for, 165 Rhetoric, 52 Riches, 124 Right, the, 90; leading to, 131; standards of, 166, 171 Rights, narrowing of individ- ual, 140 Ritchie, David, 71, 158 Roman Catholics, 93, 149 Roman empire, 153 Rousseau, 34, 74, 163 Royce, Joeiah, 119 Russell, Lord John, 143 Russia, immigration from, 17; education in, 18 Saint Paul, 163 Sanity, 7 Sarpi, 121 SchiU^, 170 Scholars, who are, 143 Schopenhauer, 90 Self-education, 13 Selfishness, 166 Senate, U. S., 115 Seneca, 13 Sentimentalism, 168 Seventh Day Adventists, 159 Sherman, 12 Smith, Qoldwin, 17, 86 Social classes, 72 Social conventions, 12, 120, 169 Social culture, 33 Social usages, 118-120, 160 Socialism, 48, 168 Societies, 141 Society, primitive, 81; ad- vancing, 157, 163 Sociology, 120 Specialists, 30, 143 Spencer, Herbert, 91 Spinosa, 68 State, relation of American to U.S., 38, 61, 65, 85; to its people, 118; control of education by, 53, 62; uni- versities, 49, 62; State selfishness, 78, 80; sphere of, 124, 165; origin of, 154 State socialism, 168 Statesmen, practical, 19, 20; the modem American, 94, 95 Statutes, unconstitutional, 101; consequential results, 103; falsely motived, 105; basis of authority of, 136 Style, literary, 20 Suffrage, a public trust, 55, 50 Sugar bounty, 79 178 INDEX Suicide, 74 Swift, Dean, 3 Syndiculiwn, 48 Tact, 11, 12 Tariffs, 87 Teachen, modes of teaching, 121 TbeoloKsr, 100; Ptotestant, 160 Theorists, 13 Tolerance, 7, 66, 99, 100 Transportation, international, 130 Tripoli, seisure of, 128 Truth, teaching the, 49 Turgot, 110 Unconstitutional statutes, 101- 103 United States, nature of gov- emment, 38, 53, 61-63, 85 United States of Europe, 154 Universe, order of, 161 Universities, growth of at- tendance at, 2, 128; Ger- man, 24; Wittenberg, 32; American State, 49; loss of coix>orate authority, 135 Victoria, Queen, 143 Voting, compulsory, 55 War, its causes, 128; modify- ing, 152 Wellington, Duke of, 94 West, Dean, 83 William and Mary College, 135 Woman, university education of, 2; political education by, 118; conservatism of, 118 World-law, 91, 97, 98 World-opinion, 131 World-politics, 63 Yale College, 5 f The boiTOwer must return this item on or before the last date stamped below. 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